1 



nm^, 






h'u 



MR. THOREAU'S WRITINGS. 



Cape Cod. 

1 vol. 16mo. 

The Maine Woods, 

1 vol. 16mo. 

* Excursions, 

1 vol. 16mo. 

Walden, or Life in the Woods, 

1 vol. 16mo. 

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack. 

1 vol. 12mo. 



TICKNOR AND FIELDS, Publishers. 




n „ 

AUTHOR OF " A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS, 
" " "excursions," "the MAINE WOODS," 



'WALDEN,' 



ETC., ETC 



Prtftcipiunt erit mirari omnia, etiam tritissima. 

Medium est calamo committere visa et utilia, 

Finis erit naturam adcuratius adlineare, quam alius [si possumus]. 

LinfUBUs de Peregrinaiione, 





BOSTON: 

TICKNOR AND FIELDS. 

1866. 



CsTdS 



Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1864, by 

TICK NOR AND FIELDS, 

in the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the District of Massachusetts. 



By transfer 

OCT 25 1915 



University Press: 

Welch, Bigelow, and Company, 

Cambridge. 



CONTENTS. ' 



PAGS 

I. The Shipweeck 1 

n. Stage-coach Views 16 

m. The Plains op Nauset 27 

IV. The Beach 51 

V. The Wellfleet Otsterman .... 72 

VI. The Beach again ..... 93 

II. Across the Cape 118 

I. The Highland Light 138 

IX. The Sea and the Desert . • . .163 
X. Provincetowk 196 




CAPE c(ri>\ 



I. 

THE SHIPWRECK. 

Wishing to get a better view than I had yet had of 
the ocean, which, we are told, covers more than two 
thirds of the globe, but of which a man who lives a few 
miles inland may never see any trace, more than of an- 
other world, I made a visit to Cape Cod in October, 
1849, another the succeeding June, and another to Truro 
in July, 1855 ; the first and last time with a single com- 
panion, the second time alone. I have spent, in all, 
about three weeks on the Cape ; walked from Eastham 
to Provincetown twice on the Atlantic side, and once 
on the Bay side also, excepting four or five miles, and 
crossed the Cape half a dozen times on my way ; but 
having come so fresh to the sea, I have got but little 
salted. My readers must expect only so much saltness 
as the land breeze acquires from blowing over an arm 
of the sea, or is tasted on the windows and the bark of 
trees twenty miles inland, after September gales. I have 
been accustomed to make excursions to the ponds within 
ten miles of Concord, but latterly I have extended my 
excursions to the sea-shore. 

I did not see why I might not make a book on Cape 

1 A 



2 CAPE COD. 

Cod, as well as my neighbor on " Human Culture." It 
is but another name for the same thing, and hardly a 
sandier phase of it. As for my title, I suppose that the 
word Cape is from the French cap ; which is from the 
Latin caput, a head ; which is, perhaps, from the verb 
capere, to take, — that being the part by which we take 
hold of a thing: — Take Time by the forelock. It is also 
the safest part to take a serpent by. And as for Cod, 
that was derived directly from that " great store of cod- 
fish " which Captain Bartholomew Gosnold caught there 
in 1 602 ; which fish appears to have been so called from 
the Saxon word codde, "a case in which seeds are 
lodged," eithei>'from the form of the fish, or the quantity 
of spawn it contains; whence also, perhaps, codling 
( ^' pomum coctile " ? ) and coddle, — to cook green like 
peas. (V. Die.) 

Cape Cod is the bared and bended arm of Massachu- 
setts : the shoulder is at Buzzard's Bay ; the elbow, or 
crazy-bone, at Cape Mallebarre; the wrist at Truro; 
and the sandy fist at Provincetown, — behind which the 
State stands on her guard, with her back to the Green 
Mountains, and her feet planted on the floor of the ocean, 
like an athlete protecting her Bay, — boxing with north- 
east storms, and, ever and anon, heaving up her Atlantic 
adversary from the lap of earth, — ready to thrust forward 
her other fist, which keeps guard the while upon her 
breast at Cape Ann. 

On studying the map, I saw that there must be an un- 
interrupted beach on the east or outside of the fore-arm 
of the Cape, more than thirty miles from the general line 
of the coast, which would afford a good sea view, but 
that, on account of an opening in the beach, forming the 
entrance to Nauset Harbor, in Orleans, I must strike it 



THE SHIPWRECK. 8 

in Easthara, if I approached it by land, and probably I 
could walk thence straight to Race Point, about twenty- 
eight miles, and not meet with any obstruction. 

We left Concord, Massachusetts, on Tuesday, October 
9th, 1849. On reaching Boston, we found that the Prov- 
incetown steamer, which should have got in the day 
before, had not yet arrived, on account of a violent 
storm ; and, as we noticed in the streets a handbill 
headed, " Death ! one hundred and forty-five lives 
lost at Cohasset," we decided to go by way of Cohasset. 
We found many Irish in the cars, going to identify bodies 
and to sympathize with the survivors, and also to attend 
the funeral which was to take place in the afternoon ; — 
and when we arrived at Cohasset, it appeared that nearly 
all the passengers were bound for the beach, which was 
about a mile distant, and many other persons were flock- 
ing in from the neighboring country. There were sev- 
eral hundreds of them streaming off over Cohasset com- 
mon in that direction, some on foot and some in wagons, 
— and among them were some sportsmen in their hunt- 
ing-jackets, with their guns, and game-bags, and dogs. 
As we passed the graveyard we saw a large hole, like a 
cellar, freshly dug there, and, just before reaching the 
shore, by a pleasantly winding and rocky road, we met 
several hay-riggings and farm-wagons coming away to- 
ward the meeting-house, each loaded with three large, 
rough deal boxes. We did not need to ask what was in 
them. The owners of the wagons were made the under- 
takers. Many horses in carriages were fastened to the 
fences near the shore, and, for a mile or more, up and 
down, the beach was covered with people looking out for 
bodies, and examining the fragments of the wreck. 
There was a small island called Brook Island, with a 



4 CAPE COD. 

hut on it, lying just off the shore. This is said to be the 
rockiest shore in Massachusetts, from Nantasket to Scit- 
uate, — hard sienitic rocks, which the waves have laid 
bare, but have not been able to crumble. It has been 
the scene of many a shipwreck. 

The brig St. John, from Galway, Ireland, laden with 
emigrants, was wrecked on Sunday morning ; it was 
now Tuesday morning, and the sea was still breaking 
violently on the rocks. There were eighteen or twenty 
of the same large boxes that I have mentioned, lying on 
a green hill-side, a few rods from the water, and sur- 
rounded by a crowd. The bodies which had been recov- 
ered, twenty-seven or eight in all, had been collected 
there. Some were rapidly nailing down the lids, others 
were carting the boxes away, and others were lifting the 
lids, which were yet loose, and peeping under the cloths, 
for each body, with such rags as still adhered to it, was 
covered loosely with a white sheet. I witnessed no signs 
of grief, but there was a sober despatch of business which 
was aflfeeting. One man was seeking to identify a par- 
ticular body, and one undertaker or carpenter was call- 
ing to another to know in what box a certain child was 
put. I saw many marble feet and matted heads as the 
cloths were raised, and one livid, swollen, and mangled 
body of a drowned girl, — who probably had intended to 
go out to service in some American family, — to which 
some rags still adhered, with a, string, half concealed by 
the flesh, about its swollen neck ; the coiled-up wreck of 
a human hulk, gashed by the rocks or fishes, so that the 
bone and muscle were exposed, but quite bloodless, — 
merely red and white, — with wide-open and staring 
eyes, yet lustreless, dead-lights ; or like the cabin win- 
dows of a stranded vessel, filled with sand. Sometimes 



• THE SHIPWRECK. 6 

there were two or more children, or a parent and child, 
in the same box, and on the lid would perhaps be writ- 
ten with red chalk, " Bridget such-a-one, and sister's 
child." The surrounding sward was covered with bits 
of sails and clothing. I have since heard, from one who 
lives by this beach, that a woman who had come over 
before, but had left her infant behind for her sister to 
bring, came and looked into these boxes, and saw in 
one, — probably the same whose superscription I have 
quoted, — her child in her sister's arms, as if the sister 
had meant to be found thus; and within three days 
after, the mother died from the effect of that sight. 

"We turned from this and walked along the rocky 
shore. In the first cove were strewn what seemed the 
fragments of a vessel, in small pieces mixed with sand 
and sea-weed, and great quantities of feathers; but it 
looked so old and rusty, that I at first took it to be 
some old wreck which had lain there many years. I 
even thought of Captain Kidd, and that the feathers 
were those which sea-fowl had cast there ; and perhaps 
there might be some tradition about it in the neighbor- 
hood. I asked a sailor if that was the St. John. He 
said it was. I asked him where she struck. He pointed 
to a rock in front of us, a mile from the shore, called the 
Grampus E-ock, and added : — 

" You can see a part of her now sticking up ; it looks 
like a small boat." 

I saw it. It was thought to be held by the chain- 
cables and the anchors. I asked if the bodies which 
I saw were all that were drowned. 

" Not a quarter of them," said he. 

" Where arc the rest ? " 

" Most of them right underneath that piece you see." 



6 CAPE COD. 

It appeared to us that there was enough rubbish to 
make the wreck of a large vessel in this cove alone, and 
that it would take many days to cart it off. It was sev 
eral feet deep, and here and there was a bonnet or a 
jacket on it. In the very midst of the crowd about tliis 
wreck, there were men with carts busily collecting the 
sea-weed which the storm had cast up, and conveying it 
beyond the reach of the tide, though they were often 
obliged to separate fragments of clothing from it, and 
they might at any moment have found a human body 
under it. Drown who might, they did not forget that 
this weed was a valuable manure. This shipwreck 
had not produced a visible vibration in the fabric of 
society. 

About a mile south we could see, rising above the 
rocks, the masts of the British brig which the St. John 
had endeavored to follow, which had slipped her cables, 
and, by good luck, run into the mouth of Cohasset Har- 
bor. A little further along the shore we saw a man's 
clothes on a rock ; further, a woman's scarf, a gown, a 
straw bonnet, the brig's caboo.-e, and one of her masts 
high and dry, broken into several pieces. In another 
rocky cove, several rods from the water, and behind 
rocks twenty feet high, lay a part of one side of the ves- 
sel, still hanging together. It was, perhaps, forty feet 
long, by fourteen wide. I was even more surprised at the 
power of the waves, exhibited on this shattered fragment, 
than I had been at the sight of the smaller fragments be- 
fore. The largest timbers and iron braces were broken 
superfluously, and I saw that no material could with- 
stand the power of the waves ; that iron must go to 
pieces in such a ca>e, and an iron vessel would be cracked 
up like an egg-shell on the rocks. Some of these tim- 



- THE SHIPWRECK. 7 

bers, however, were so rotten that I could almost thrust 
my umbrella through them. They told us that some 
were saved on this piece, and also showed where the sea 
had heaved it into this cove, which was now dry. When 
I saw where it had come in, ahd in what condition, I 
wondered that any had been saved on it. A little fur- 
ther on a crowd of men was collected around the mate 
of the St. John, who was telling his story. He was a 
shm-looking youth, who spoke of the captain as the mas- 
ter, and seemed a little excited. He was saying that 
when they jumped into the boat, she filled, and, the ves- 
sel lurching, the weight of the water in the boat caused 
the painter to break, and so they were separated. 
Whereat one man came away, saying: — 

" Well, I do n't see but he tells a straight story 
enough. You see, the weight of the water in the boat 
broke the painter. A boat full of water is very 
heavy," — and so on, in a loud and impertinently 
earnest tone, as if he had a bet depending on it, but 
had no humane interest in the matter. 

Another, a large man, stood near by upon a rock, 
gazing into the sea, and chewing large quids of tobacco, 
as if that habit were^ forever confirmed with him. 

*' Come," says another to his companion, " let 's be off. 
We've seen the whole of it. It's no use to stay to the 
funeral." 

Further, we saw one standing upon a rock, wh©, we 
were told, was one that was saved. He was a sober- 
looking man. dressed in a jacket and gray pantaloons, 
v.'ith his hands in the pockets. I asked him a few ques- 
tions, which he answered ; but he seemed unwilling to 
talk about it, and soon walked away. By his side stood 
one of the life-boat men, in an oil-cloth jacket, who told 



8 CAPE COD. 

us how thoy went to the relief of the British brig, think- 
ing that the boat of the St. Jolin, which they passed on 
the way, held all her crew, — for the waves prevented 
their seeing those who were ^on the vessel, though they 
might have saved some had they known there were any 
there. A little further was the flag of the St. John 
spread on a rock to dry, and held down by stones at the 
corners. This frail, but essential and significant portion 
of the vessel, which had so long been the sport of the 
winds, was sure to reach the shore. There were one or 
two houses visible from these rocks, in which were some 
of the survivors recovering from the shock which their 
bodies and minds had sustained. One was not expected 
to live. 

We kept on down the shore as far as a promontory 
called Whitehead, that we might see more of the Cohas- 
8et Rocks. In a little cove, within half a mile, there 
were an old man and his son collecting, with their team, 
the sea-weed which that fatal storm had cast up, as 
serenely employed as if there had never been a wreck 
in the world, though they were within sight of the Gram- 
pus Rock, on which the St. John had struck. The old 
man had heard that there was a wreck, and knew most 
of the particulars, but he said that he had not been up 
there since it happened. It was the wrecked weed that 
concerned him most, rock-weed, kelp, and sea-weed, as 
he flamed them, which he carted to his barn-yard ; 
and those bodies were to him but other weeds which the 
tide cast up, but which were of no u«e to him. We 
afterwards came to the life-boat in its harbor, waiting for 
another emergency, — and in the afternoon we saw the 
funeral procession at a distance, at the head of which 
walked the captain with the other survivors. 



THE SHIPWRECK. 9 

On the whole, it was not so impressive a scene as I 
might have expected. If I had found one body cast 
upon the beach in some lonely place, it would have 
affected me more. I sympathized rather with the winds 
and waves, as if to toss and mangle these poor human 
bodies was the order of the day. If this was the law of 
Nature, why waste any time in awe or pity? If the 
last day were come, we should not think so much about 
the separation of friends or the blighted prospects of 
individuals. I saw that corpses might be multiplied, as 
on the field of battle, till they no longer affected us in 
any degree, as exceptions to the common lot of humanity. 
Take all the graveyards together, they are always the 
majority. It is the individual and private that demands 
our sympathy. A man can attend but. one funeral in 
the course of his life, can behold but one corpse. Yet 
I saw that the inhabitants of the shore would be not a 
little affected by this event. They would watch there 
many days and nights for the sea to give up its dead, 
and their imaginations and = sympathies would supply the 
place of mourners far away, who as yet knew not of the 
wreck. Many days after this, something white was seen 
floating on the water by one who vfas sauntering on tlie 
beach. It was approached in a boat, and found to be the 
body of a woman, which had risen in an upright position, 
whose white cap was blown back with the wind. I saw 
that the beauty of the shore itself was wrecked for many 
a lonely walker there, until he could perceive, at last, 
how its beauty was enhanced by wrecks like this, and it 
acquired thus a rarer and sublimer beauty still. 

"Why care for these dead bodies ? They really have 
no friends but the worms or fishes. Their owners were 
coming to the New World, as Columbus and the Pil- 
1* 



10 CAFE COD. 

grims did, — they were within a mile of its shores ; but, 
before they could reach it, they emigrated to a newer 
world than ever Columbus dreamed of, yet one of whose 
existence we believe that there is far more universal and 
convincing evidence — though it has not yet been dis- 
covered by science — than Columbus had of this ; not 
merely mariners' tales and some paltry drift-wood and 
sea-weed, but a continual drift and instinct to all our 
shores. I saw their empty hulks that came to land ; but 
they themselves, meanwhile, were cast upon some shore 
yet lurther west, toward which we are all tending, and 
which we shall reach at last, it may be through storm 
and darkness, as they did. No doubt, we have reason to 
thank God that they have not been " shipwrecked into 
life again." The mariner who makes the safest port in 
Heaven, perchance, seems to his friends on earth to be 
sliipwrecked, for they deem Boston Harbor the better 
place; though perhaps invisible to them, "a skilful pilot 
comes to meet him, and the fairest and balmiest gales 
blow off that coast, his good ship makes the land in 
halcyon days, and he kisses the shore in rapture there, 
while his old hulk tosses in the surf here. It is hard to 
part with one's body, but, no doubt, it is easy enough to 
do without it when once it is gone. All their plans and 
hopes burst like a bubble ! Infants by the score dashed 
on the rocks by the enraged Atlantic Ocean ! No, no ! 
If the St. John did not make her port here, she has been 
telegraphed there. The strongest wind cannot stagger a 
Spirit ; it is a Spirit's breath. A just man's purpose 
cannot be split on any Grampus or material rock, but 
itself will split rocks till it succeeds. 

The verses addressed to Columbus, dying, may, with 
glight alterations, be applied to the passengers of the St. 
John : — 



THE SHIPWRECK. 11 

" Soon with them will all be over, 
Soon the voyage will be begun 
That shall bear them to discover, 
Far away, a land unknown. 

" Land that each, alone, must visit, 
But no tidings bring to men ; 
For no sailor, once departed, 
Ever hath returned again. 

"No carved wood, no broken branches, 
Ever drift from that far wild; 
He who on that ocean launches 
Sleets no corse of angel child. 

'* Undismayed, my noble sailors, 
Spread, then spread your canvas out ; 
Spirits ! on a sea of ether 
Soon shall ye serenely float! 

" Where the deep no plummet soundeth, 
Fear no hidden breakers there, 
And the fanning wing of angels 
Shall your bai'k right onward bear. 

" Quit, now, full of heart and comfort, 
These rude shores, they are of earth ; 
Where the rosy clouds are parting. 
There the blessed isles loom forth." 

One summer day, since this, I came this way, on foot, 
along the shore from Boston. It was so warm, that 
some horses had climbed to the very top of the ramparts 
of the old fort at Hull, where there was hardly room to 
turn round, for the sake of the breeze. The Datura 
stramonium^ or thorn-apple, was in full bloom along the 
beach ; and, at sight of this cosmopolite, — this Captain 
Cook among plants, — carried in ballast all over the 
world, I felt as if I were on the highway of nations. 
Say, rather, this Viking, king of the Bays, for it is not 
an innocent plant ; it suggests not merely commerce, but 



12 CAPE COD. 

its attendant vices, as if its fibres were the stuff of which 
pirates spin their yarns. I heard the voices of men 
shouting aboard a vessel, half a raile from the shore, 
which sounded as if they were in a barn in the country, 
they being between the sails. It was a purely rural 
sound. As I looked over the water, I saw the isles 
rapidly wasting away, the sea nibbling voraciously at the 
continent, the springing arch of a hill suddenly inter- 
rupted, as at Point Alderton, — what botanists might call 
premorse, — showing, by its curve against the bky, how 
much space it must have occupied, where now was water 
only. On the other hand, these wrecks of isles were 
being fancifully arranged into new shores, as at Hog 
Island, inside of Hull, where everything seemed to be 
gently lapsing into futurity. This isle had got the very 
form of a ripple, — and I thought that the inhabitants 
should bear a ripple for device on their shields, a wave 
passing over them, with the datura, which is said to pro- 
duce mental alienation of long duration without afiecting 
the bodily health,* springing from its edge. The most 

* The Jamestown weed (or thorn-apple). " This, being an early plant, 
was gathered very young for a boiled salad, by some of the soldiers 
sent thither [i. e. to Virginia] to quell the rebellion of Bacon; and some 
of them ate plentifully of it, the effect of which was a very pleasant 
comedy, for they turned natural fools upon it for several days : one 
would blow up a feather in theairj another would dart straws at it with 
much fury; and another, stark naked, was sitting up in a corner like a 
monkey, grinning and making mows at them ; a fourth would fondly 
kiss and paw his companions, and sneer in their faces, with a counte- 
nance more antic than any in a Dutch droll. In this frantic con- 
dition they were confined, lest they should, in their folly, destroy 
themselves, — though it was observed that all their actions were 
full of innocence and good nature. Indeed, they were not very 
cleanly. A thousand such simple tricks they plaj'ed, and after 
eleven days returned to themselves agai*i, not remembering any- 
thing that had passed." — Beverly's Uistory of Virginia^ p. 120. 



THE SHIPWRECK. 13 

interesting thing which I heard of, in this township of 
Hull, was an unfailing spring, whose locality was pointed 
out to me, on the side of a distant hill, as I was panting 
along the shore, though I did not visit it. Perhaps, if 1 
should go through Rome, it would be some spring on the 
Capitoline Hill I should remember the longest. It is 
true, I was somewhat interested in the well at the old 
French fort, which was said to be ninety feet deep, with 
a cannon at the bottom of it. On Nantasket beach I 
counted a dozen chaises from the public-house. Fi'om 
time to time the riders turned their horses toward the 
sea, standing in the water for the coolness, — and I saw 
the value of beaches to cities for the sea breeze and the 
bath. 

At Jerusalem village the inhabitants were collecting 
in haste, before a thunder-shower now approaching, the 
Irish moss which they had spread to dry. The shower 
passed on one side, and gave me a few drops only, 
which did not cool the air. I merely felt a puff upon 
my cheek, though, within sight, a vessel was capsized in 
the bay, and several others dragged their anchors, and 
were near going ashore. The sea-bathing at Cohasset 
Rocks was perfect. The water was purer and more 
transparent than any I had ever seen. There was not 
a particle of mud or slime about it. The bottom being 
sandy, I could see the sea-perch swimming about. The 
smooth and fantastically worn rocks, and the perfectly 
clean and tress-like rock-weeds falling over you, and 
attached so firmly to the rocks that you could pull your- 
self up by them, greatly enhanced the luxury of the 
bath. The stripe of barnacles just above the weeds 
reminded me of some vegetable growth, — the buds, and 
petals, and seed-vessels of flowers. They lay along the 



14 CAPE COD. 

seams of the rock like buttons on a waistcoat. It was 
one of the hottest days in the year, yet I found the water 
so icy cold that I could swim but a stroke or two, and 
thought that, in case of shipwreck, there would be more 
danger of being cliilled to death than simply drowned. 
One immersion was enough to make you forget the dog- 
days utterly. Though you were sweltering before, it 
will take you half an hour now to remember that it was 
ever warm. There were the tawny rocks, like lions 
couchant, defying the ocean, whose waves incessantly 
dashed against and scoured them with vast quantities 
of gravel. The water held in their little hollows, on the 
receding of the tide, was so crystalline that I could not 
believe it salt, but wished to drink it; and higher 
up were basins of fresh water left by the rain, — all 
which, being also of different depths and temperature, 
were convenient for different kinds of baths. Also, 
the larger hollows in the smoothed rocks formed the 
most convenient of seats and dressing-rooms. In 
these respects it was the most perfect sea-shore that 
I had seen. 

I saw in Cohasset, separated from the sea only by a 
narrow beach, a handsome but shallow lake of some 
four hundred acres, which, I was told, the sea had tossed 
over the beach in a great storm in the spring, and, after 
the alewives had passed into it, it had stopped up its out- 
let, and now the alewives were dying by thousands, and 
the inhabitants were apprehending a pestilence as the 
water evaporated. It had five rocky islets in it. 

This rocky shore is called Pleasant Cove, on some 
maps ; on the map of Cohasset, that name appears to be 
confined to the particular cove where I saw the wreck 
of the St. John. The ocean did not look, now, as if any 



THE SHIPWRECK. 15 

were ever shipwrecked in it ; it was not grand and sub- 
lime, but beautiful as a lake. Not a vestige of a wreck 
was visible, nor could I believe that the bones of many 
a shipwrecked man were buried in that pure sand. But 
to go on with our first excursion. 



II. 

STAGE-COACH VIEWS. 



After spending the night in Bridgewater, and picking 
up a few arrow-heads there in the morning, we took the 
cars for Sandwich, where we arrived before noon. This 
was the terminus of the " Cape Cod Raih'oad," though 
it is but the beginning of the Cap^. As it rained hard, 
with driving mists, and there was no sign of its holding 
up, we here took that almost obsolete conveyance, the 
stage, for " as far as it went that day," as we told the 
driver. We had forgotten how far a stage could go in 
a day, but we were told that the Cape roads were very 
" heavy," though they added that, being of sand, the rain 
would improve them. This coach was an exceedingly 
narrow one, but as there was a slight spherical excess 
over two on a seat, the driver waited till nine passengers 
had got in, without taking the measure of any of them, 
and then shut the door after two or three ineffectual 
slams, as if the fault were all in the hinges or the latch, 
— while we timed our inspirations and expirations so as 
to assist him. 

We were now fairly on the Cape, which extends from 
Sandwich eastward thirty -five miles, and thence north 
and northwest thirty more, in all sixty-five, and has an 
average breadth of about five miles. In the interior it 



STAGE-COACH VIEWS. 17 

rises to the height of two hundred, and sometimes perhaps 
three hundred feet above the level of the sea. Accord- 
ing to Hitchcock, the geologist of the State, it is com- 
posed almost entirely of sand, even to the depth of three 
hundred feet in some places, though there is probably 
a concealed core of rock a little beneath the surface, 
and it is of diluvian origin, excepting a small portion at 
the extremity and elsewhere along the shores, which is 
alluvial. For tlie first half of the Cape large blocks of 
stone are found, here and there, mixed with the sand, 
but for the last thirty miles boulders, or even gravel, are 
rarely met with. Hitchcock conjectures that the ocean 
has, in course of time, eaten out Boston Harbor and other 
bays in the mainland, and that the minute fragments 
have been deposited by the currents at a distance from 
the shore, and formed this sand-bank. Above the sand, 
if the surfiice is subjected to agricultural tests, there is 
found to be a thin layer of soil gradually diminishing 
from Barnstable to Truro, where it ceases ; but there 
are many holes and rents in this weather-beaten gar- 
ment not likely to be stitched in time, which reveal the 
naked flesh of the Cape, and its extremity is completely 
bare. 

I at once got out my book, the eighth volume of the 
Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 
printed in 1802, which contains some short notices of the 
Cape towns, and began to read up to where I was, for 
in the cars I could not read as fast as I travelled. To 
those who came from the side of Plymouth, it said : 
" After riding through a body of woods, twelve miles in 
extent, interspersed with but few houses, the settlement 
of Sandwich appears, with a more agreeable effect, to 
the eye of the traveller." Another writer speaks of this 



18 CAPE COD. 

as a beautiful village. But I think that our villages will 
bear to be contrasted only with one another, not with 
Nature. I have no great respect for the v»'riter's taste, 
who talks easily about heautiful villages, embellished, 
perchance, with a " fulling-mill," " a handsome acad- 
emy," or meeting-house, and "a number of shops for 
the diflferent mechanic arts " ; where the green and white 
houses of the gentry, drawn up in rows, front on a street 
of which it would be difficult to tell whether it is most 
like a desert or a long stable-yard. Such spots can be 
beautiful only to the weary traveller, or the returning na- 
tive, — or, perchance, the repentant misanthrope ; not to 
him who, with unprejudiced senses, has just come out of 
the woods, and approaches one of them, by a bare road, 
through a succession of straggling homesteads where he 
cannot tell which is the alms-house. However, as for 
Sandwich, I cannot speak particularly. Ours was but 
half a Sandwich at most, and that must have fallen on 
the buttered side some time. I only saw that it was a 
closely-built town for a small one, with glass-works to 
improve its sand, and narrow streets in which we turned 
round and round till we could not tell which way we 
were going, and the rain came in, first on this side, and 
then on that, and I saw that they in the houses were 
more comfortable than we in the coach. My book also 
said of this town, " The inhabitants, in general, are 
substantial livers," — that is, I suppose, they do not live 
like philosophers ; but, as the stage did not stop long 
enough for us to dine, we had no opportunity to test the 
truth of this statement. It may have referred, however, 
to the quantity " of oil they would yield." It further 
said, " The inhabitants of Sandwich generally manifest a 
fond and steady adherence to the manners, employments, 



STAGE-COACH VIEWS. 19 

and modes of living which characterized their fathers " ; 
which made me think that they were, after all, very 
much like all the rest of the world ; — and it added tiiat 
this was " a resemblance, which, at this day, will con- 
stitute no impeachment of either their virtue or taste " ; 
which remark proves to me that the writer was one with 
the rest of tliem. No people ever lived by cursing their 
fathers, however great a curse their fathers might have 
been to them. But it must be confessed that ours was old 
authority, and probably they have changed all that now. 
Our route was along the Bay side, through Barnstable, 
Yarmouth, Dennis, and Brewster, to Orleans, with a 
range of low hills on our right, running down the Cape. 
The weather was not favorable for wayside views, but 
we made the most of such glimpses of land and water as 
we could get through the rain. The country was, for 
the most part, bare, or with only a little scrubby wood 
left on the hills. We noticed in Yarmouth — and, if I 
do not mistake, in Dennis — large tracts where pitch- 
pines were planted four or five years before. They were 
in rows, as they appeared when we were abreast of them, 
and, excepting that there were extensive vacant spaces, 
seemed to be doing remarkably well. This, we were 
told, was the only use to which such tracts could be prof- 
itably put. Every higher eminence had a pole set up 
on it, with an old storm-coat or sail tied to it, for a signal, 
that those on the south side of the Cape, fo;.' instance, 
might know when the Boston packets had arrive/1 on the 
north. It appeared as if this use must absorb the 
greater part of the old clothes of the Cape, leaving but 
few rags for the peddlers. The wind-mills on the hills, — 
large weather-stained 'octagonal structures, — and the 
salt-works scattered all along the shore, with tlieir 



20 CAPE COD. 

long rows of vats resting on piles driven into the marsh, 
their low, turtle-like roofs, and their slighter wind-mills, 
were novel and interesting objects to an inlander. The 
sand by the roadside was partially covered with bunches 
of a moss-like plant, Hudsonia tomeMosa, which a woman 
in the stage told us was called " poverty grass," because 
it grew where nothing else would. 

I was struck by the pleasant equality which reigned 
among the stage company, and their broad and invulner- 
able good humor. They were what is called free and 
easy, and met one another to advantage, as men who had, 
at length, learned how to live. They appeared to know 
each other when they were strangers, they were so sim- 
ple and downright. They were well met, in an unusual 
sense, that is, they met as well as they could meet, and 
did not seem to be troubled with any impediment. They 
were not afraid nor ashamed of one another, but were 
contented to make just such a company as the ingredients 
allowed. It was evident that the same foolish respect 
was not here claimed, for mere wealth and station, that 
is in many parts of New England ; yet some of them 
were the " first people," as they are called, of the va- 
rious towns through which we passed. Retired sea- 
captains, in easy circumstances, who talked of fai'ming 
as sea-captains are wont ; an erect, respectable, and 
trustworthy-looking man, in his wrapper, some of the 
salt of the earth, who had formerly been the salt of the 
sea ; or a more courtly gentleman, who, perchance, had 
been a representative to the General Court in his day ; 
or a broad, red-fi\ced Cape Cod man, who had seen too 
many storms to be easily irritated ; or a fisherman's wife, 
who had been waiting a week for a coaster to leave 
Boston, and had at length come by the cars. 



STAGE-COACH VIEWS. 21 

A strict regard for truth obliges us to saj, that the few 
women whom we saw that day looked exceedingly 
pinched up. They had prominent chins and noses, hav- 
ing lost all their teeth, and a sharp W would represent 
their profile. They were not so well preserved as their 
husbands; or perchance they were well preserved as 
dried specimens. (Their husbands, however, were pic- 
kled.) But we respect them not the less for all that ; our 
own dental system is far from perfect. 

Still we kept on in the rain, or, if we stopped, it was 
commonly at a post-office, and we thought that writing 
letters, and sorting them against our arrival, must be the 
principal employment of the inhabitants of the Cape, 
this rainy day. The Post-office appeared a singularly do- 
mestic institution here. Ever and anon the stage stopped 
before some low shop or dwelhng, and a wheelwright 
or shoemaker appeared in his shirt sleeves and leather 
apron, with spectacles newly donned, holding up Uncle 
Sam's bag, as if it were a slice of home-made cake, for 
the travellers, while he retailed some piece of gossip to 
the driver, really as indifferent to the presence of the 
former as if they were so much baggage. In one in- 
stance, we understood that a woman was the post-mis- 
tress, and they said that she made the best one on the 
road; but we suspected that the letters must be sub- 
jected to a very close scrutiny there. While we were 
stopping, for this purpose, at Dennis, we ventured to put 
our heads out of the windows, to see where we were 
going, and saw rising before us, through the mist, singu- 
lar barren hills, all stricken with poverty-grass, looming 
up as if they were in the horizon, though they were close 
to us, and we seemed to have got to the end of the land 
on that side, notwithstanding that the horses were still 



22 CAPE COD. 

\ 
headed that way. Indeed, that part of Dennis which we 
saw was an exceedingly barren and desolate country, of 
a character which I can find no name for ; such a sur- 
face, perhaps, as the bottom of the sea made dry land 
day before yesterday. It was covered with poverty- 
grass, and there was hardly a tree in sight, but here and 
there a little weather-stained, one-storied house, with a 
red roof, — for often the roof was painted, though the 
rest of the house was not, — standing bleak and cheer- 
less, yet with a broad foundation to the land, where the 
comfort must have been all inside. Yet we read in the 
Gazetteer — for we carried that too with us — that, in 
1837, one hundred and fifty masters of vessels, belong- 
ing to this to^\^l, sailed from the various ports of the 
Union. There must be many more houses in the south 
part of the town, else we cannot imagine where they all 
lodge when they are at home, if ever they are there ; but 
the truth is, their houses are floating ones, and their 
home is on the ocean. There were almost no trees at 
all in this part of Dennis, nor could I learn tliat they 
talked of setting out any. It is true, there was a meet- 
ing-house, set round with Lombardy poplars, in a hollow 
square, the rows fully as straight as the studs of a build- 
ing, and the corners as square ; but, if I do not mistake, 
every one of them was dead. I could not help thinking 
that they needed a revival here. Our book said that, in 
1795, there was erected in Dennis "an elegant meeting- 
house, with a steeple." Perhaps this was the one ; 
though whether it had a steeple, or had died down so far 
from sympathy with the poplars, I do not remember. 
Another meeting-house in this town was described as a 
*' neat building " ; but of the meeting-house in Chatham, 
a neighboring town, for there was then but one, noth- 



STAGE-COACH VIEWS. 23 

ing is said, except that it " is in good repair," — both 
which remarks, I trust, may be understood as applying 
to the churches spiritual as well as material. However, 
" elegant meeting-houses," from that Trinity one on 
Broadway, to this at Nobscusset, in my estimation, belong 
to the same category with " beautiful villages." I was 
never in season to see one. Handsome is that hand- 
some does. "What they did for shade here, in warm 
weather, we did not know, though we read that " fogs 
are more frequent in Chatham than in any other part of 
the country ; and they serve in summer, instead of trees, 
to shelter the houses against the heat of the sun. To 
those M'ho delight in extensive vision," — is it to be 
inferred that the inhabitants of Chatham do not? — 
"they are unpleasant, but they are not found to be 
unhealthful." Probably, also, the unobstructed sea- 
breeze answers the purpose of a fan. The historian of 
Chatham says further, that " in many families there is no 
difference between the breakfast and supper ; cheese, 
cakes, and pies being as common at the one as at the 
other." But that leaves us still uncertain whether they 
were really common at either. 

The road, which was quite hilly, here ran near the 
Bay-shore, having the Bay on one side, and " the rough 
hill of Scargo," said to be the highest land on the Cape, 
on the other. Of the wide prospect of the Bay afforded 
by the summit of this hill, our guide says : " The view 
has not much of the beautiful in it, but it communicates 
a strong emotion of the sublime." That is the kind of 
communication which we love to have made to us. We 
passed through the village of Suet, in Dennis, on Suet 
and Quivet Necks, of which it is said, " when compared 
with Nobscusset," — we had a misty recollection of hav- 



24 CAPE COD. 

ing passed through, or near to, the latter, — " it may be 
denominated a pleasant village ; but, in comparison with 
the village of Sandwich, there is little or no beauty in 
it." However, we liked Dennis well, better than any 
town we had seen on the Cape, it was so novel, and, in 
that stormy day, so sublimely dreary. 

Captain John Sears, of Suet, was the first person in 
this country who obtained pui-e marine salt by solar 
evaporation alone ; though it had long been made in 
a similar way on the coast of France, and elsewhere. 
This was in the year 1776, at which time, on account of 
the war, salt was scarce and dear. The Historical Col- 
lections contain an interesting account of his experi- 
ments, which we read when we first saw the roofs of the 
salt-works. Barnstable county is the most favorable 
locality for these works on our northern coast, — there 
is so little fresh water here emptying into ocean. Quite 
recently there were about two millions of dollars in- 
vested in this business here. But now the Cape is un* 
able to compete with the importers of salt and the 
manufacturers of it at the West, and, accordingly, her 
salt-works are fast going to decay. From making salt, 
they turn to fishing more than ever. The Gazetteer 
will uniformly tell you, under the head of each town, 
how many go a-fishing, and the value of the fish and oil 
taken, how much salt is made and used, how many are 
engaged in the coasting trade, how many in manufactur- 
ing palm-leaf hats, leather, boots, shoes, and tinware, 
and then it has done, and leaves you to imagine the 
more truly domestic manufactures which are nearly the 
same all the world over. 

Late in the afternoon, we rode through Brewster, so 
named after Elder Brewster, for fear he would be for- 



STAGE-COACH VIEWS. 25 

gotten else. "Who has not heard of Elder Brewster? 
"Who knows who he was ? This appeared to be the 
modern-built town of the Cape, the favorite residence 
of retired sea-captains. It is said that " there are more 
masters and mates of vessels which sail on foreign voy- 
ages belonging to this place than to any other town in 
the country." There were many of the modern Ameri- 
can houses here, such as they turn out at Cambridge- 
port, standing on the sand ; you could almost swear that 
they had been floated down Charles River, and drifted 
across the bay. I call them American, because they 
are paid for by Americans, and " put up " by American 
carpenters ; but they are little removed from lumber ; 
only Eastern stuff disguised with white paint, the least 
interesting kind of drift-wood to me. Perhaps we have 
reason to be proud of our naval architecture, and need 
not go to the Greek.s, or the Goths, or the Italians, for 
the models of our vessels. Sea-captains do not employ 
a Cambridgeport carpenter to build their floating houses, 
and for their houses on shore, if they must copy any, 
it would be more agreeable to the imagination to see 
one of their vessels turned bottom upward, in the Numid- 
ian fashion. "We read that, " at certain seasons, the 
reflection of the sun upon the windows of the houses in 
"Wellfleet and Truro (across the inner side of the elbow 
of the Cape) is discernible with the naked eye, at a 
distance of eighteen miles and upward, on the county 
road." This we were pleased to imagine, as we had not 
seen the sun for twenty-four hours. 

The same author (the Rev. John Simpkins) said of 
the inhabitants, a good while ago : " No persons appear 
to have a greater relish for the social circle and domes- 
tic pleasures. They are not in the habit of frequenting 
2 



26 CAPE COD. 

taverns, unless on public occasions. I know not of a 
proper idler or tavern-haunter in the place." This is 
more than can be said of my townsmen. 

At length, we stopped for the night at Higgins's tav- 
ern, in Orleans, feeling very much a^ if we were on a 
sand-bar in the ocean, and not knowing whether we 
should see land or water ahead when the mist cleared 
away. We here overtook two Italian boys, who had 
waded thus far down the Cape through the sand, with 
their organs on their backs, and were going on to Prov- 
incetown. What a hard lot, we thought, if the Prov- 
incetown people should shut their doors against them ! 
Whose yard would they go to next ? Yet we concluded 
that they had chosen wisely to come here, where other 
music than that of the surf must be rare. Thus the 
great civilizer sends out its emissaries, sooner or later, 
to every sandy cape and light-house of the New World 
which the census-taker visits, and summons the savage 
there to surrender. 



III. 

THE PLAINS OF NAUSET. 

The next morning, Thursday, October 11th, it rmned, 
as hard as ever ; but we were determined to proceed on 
foot, nevertheless. We first made some inquiries with 
regard to the practicability of walking up the shore on 
the Atlantic side to Provincetown, whether we should 
meet with any creeks or marshes to trouble us. Hig- 
gins said that there was no obstruction, and that it was 
not much farther than by the road, but he thought that 
we should find it very " heavy " walking in the sand ; 
it was bad enough in the road, a horse would sink in up 
to the fetlocks there. But there was one man at the 
tavern who had walked it, and he said that we could go 
very well, though it was sometimes inconvenient and 
even dangerous walking under the bank, when there was 
a great tide, with an easterly wind, which caused the 
sand to cave. For the first i^ur or five miles we fol- 
lowed the road, which here turns to the north on the el- 
bow, — the narrowest part of the Cape, — that we might 
clear an inlet from the ocean, a part of Nauset Harbor, 
in Orleans, on our right. "We found the travelling good 
enough for walkers on the sides of the roads, though it 
was " heavy " for horses in the middle. We walked 
with our umbrellas behind us, since it blowed hard as 



28 CAPE COD. 

well as rained, with driving mists, as the day before, 
and the wind helped us over the sand at a rapid rate. 
Everything indicated that we had reached a strange 
shore. The road was a mere lane, winding over bare 
swells of bleak and barren-looking land. The houses 
were few and far between, besides being small and rusty, 
though they appeared to be kept in good repair, and 
their door-yards, which were the unfenced Cape, were 
tidy ; or, rather, they looked as if the ground around 
them was blown clean by the wind. Perhaps the scar- 
city of wood here, and the consequent absence of the 
wood-pile and other wooden traps, had something to do 
with this appearance. They seemed, like mariners 
ashore, to have sat right down to enjoy the firmness of 
the land, without studying their postures or habiliments. 
To them it was merely terra firma and cognita, not yet 
fertilis Sind jucu7ida. Every landscape which is dreary 
enough has a certain beauty to my eyes, and in this in- 
stance its permanent qualities were enhanced by the 
weather. Everything told of the sea, even when we 
did not see its waste or hear its roar. For birds there 
were gulls, and for carts in the fields, boats turned bot- 
tom upward against the houses, and sometimes the rib 
of a whale was woven into the fence by the road-side. 
The trees were, if possible, rarer than the houses, ex- 
cepting apple-trees, of which there were a few small 
orchards in the hollows. These were either narrow and 
high, with flat tops, having lost their side branches, like 
huge plum-bushes growing in exposed situations, or else 
dwarfed and branching immediately at the ground, like 
quince-bushes. They suggested that, under like circum- 
stances, all trees would at last acquire like habits of 
growth. I afterward saw on the Cape many full-grown 



1. 
THE PLAINS OF NAUSET. 29 

apple-trees not higher than a man's head ; one whole 
orchard, indeed, where all the fruit could have been 
gathered by a man standing on the ground ; but you 
could hardly creep beneath the trees. Some, which the 
owners told me were twenty years old, were only three 
and a half feet high, spreading at six inches from the 
ground five feet each way, and being withal surrounded 
with boxes of tar to catch the cankerworms, they looked 
like plants in flower-pots, and as if they might be taken 
into the house in the winter. In another place, I saw 
some not much larger than currant-bushes ; yet the 
owner told me that they had borne a barrel and a half 
of apples that fall. If they had been placed close to- 
gether, I could have cleared them all at a jump. I 
measured some near the Highland Light in Truro, which 
had been taken from the shrubby woods thereabouts 
when young, and grafted. One, which had beejQ set ten 
years, was on an average eighteen inches high, and 
spread nine feet with a flat top. It had borne one bushel 
of apples two years before. Another, probably twenty 
years old from the seed, was five feet high, and spread 
eighteen feet, branching, as usual, at the ground, so that 
you could not creep under it. This bore a barrel of 
apples two years before. The owner of these trees in- 
variably used the personal pronoun in speaking of them ; 
as, " I got him out of the woods, but he does n't bear." 
The largest that I saw in that neighborhood was nine 
feet high to the topmost leaf, and spread thirty-three 
feet, branching at the ground five ways. 

In one yard I observed a single, very healthy-looking 
tree, while all the rest were dead or dying. The occu- 
pant said that his father had manured all but that one 
with blackfish. 



30 CAPE COD. 

This habit of growth should, no doubt, be encouraged ; 
and they should not be trimmed up, as some travelling 
practitioners have advised. In 1802 there was not a 
single fruit-tree in Chatham, the next town to Orleans, 
on the south ; and the old account of Orleans sajs : 
" Fruit-trees cannot be made to grow within a mile of 
the ocean. Even those which are placed at a greater 
distance are injured by the east winds ; and, after vio- 
lent storms in the spring, a saltish taste is perceptible on 
their bark." AYe noticed that they were often covered 
with a yellow lichen like rust, the Parmelia parietina. 

The most foreign and picturesque structures on the 
Cape, to an inlander, not excepting the salt-works, are 
the wind-mills, — gray-looking octagonal towers, with 
long timbers slanting to the ground in the rear, and there 
resting on a cart-wheel, by which their fans are turned 
round to face the wind. These appeared also to serve 
in some measure for props against its force. A great 
circular rut was worn around the building by the wheel. 
The neighbors who assemble to turn the mill to the wind 
are hkely to know which way it blows, without a weather- 
cock. They looked loose and slightly locomotive, like 
huge wounded birds, trailing a wing or a leg, and re- 
minded one of pictures of the Netherlands. Being on 
elevated ground, and high in themselves, they serve as 
landmarks, — for there are no tall trees, or other objects 
commonly, which can be seen at a distance in the hori- 
zon ; though the outline of the land itself is so firm and 
distinct, that an insignificant cone, or even precipice of 
sand, is visible at a great distance from over the sea. 
Sailors making the land commonly steer either by the 
wind-mills or the meeting-houses. In the country, we 
are obliged to steer by the meeting-houses alone. Yet 



THE PLAINS OF XAUSET. 31 

the meeting-house is a kind of wind-mill, which runs one 
day in seven, turned either by the winds of doctrine or 
public opinion, or more rarely by the winds of Heaven, 
where another sort of grist is ground, of which, if it be 
not all bran or musty, if it be not plaster^ we trust to 
make bread of life. 

There were, here and there, heaps of shells in the 
fields, where clams had been opened for bait ; for Orleans 
is famous for its shell-fish, especially clams, or, as our 
author says, "to speak more properly, worms." The 
shores are more fertile than the dry land. The in- 
habitants measure their crops, not only by bushels of 
com, but by barrels of clams. A thousand barrels of 
clam-bait are counted as equal in value to six or eight 
thousand bushels of Indian com, and once they were 
procured without more labor or expense, and the supply 
was thought to be inexhaustible. " For," runs the his- 
tory, " after a portion of the shore has been dug over, 
and almost all the clams taken up, at the end of two 
years, it is said, they are as plenty there as ever. It is 
even afiirmed by many persons, that it is as necessary 
to stir the clam ground frequently as it is to hoe a field 
of potatoes ; because, if this labor is omitted, the clams 
will be crowded too closely together, and will be pre- 
vented from increasing in size." But we were told that 
the small clam, Mya arenaria, was not so plenty here as 
formerly. Probably the clam-ground has been stirred 
too frequently, after all. Nevertheless, one man, w*ho 
complained that they fed pigs with them and so made 
them scarce, told me that he dug and opened one hun- 
dred and twenty-six dollars' worth in one winter, in 
Truro. 

We crossed a brook, not more than fourteen rods long, 



32 CAPE COD. 

between Orleans and Eastham, called Jeremiali's Gutter. 
The Atlantic is said sometimes to meet the Bay here, 
and isolate the northern part of the Cape. The streams 
of the Cape are necessarily formed on a minute scale, 
since there is no room for them to run, without tumbling 
immediately into the sea ; and beside, we found it diffi- 
cult to run ourselves in that sand, when there was no 
want of room. Hence, the least channel where water 
runs, or may run, is important, and is dignified with 
a name. We read that there is no running water in 
Chatham, which is the next town. The barren aspect 
of the land would hardly be beheved if described. It 
was such soil, or rather land, as, to judge from appear- 
ances, no farmer in the interior would think of cultivat- 
ing, or. even fencing. Generally, the ploughed fields of 
the Cape look white and yellow, like a mixture of salt and 
Indian meal. This is called soil. All an inlander's no- 
tions of soil and fertility will be confounded by a visit to 
these parts, and he will not be able, for some time after- 
ward, to distinguish soil from sand. The historian of 
Chatham says of a part of that town, which has been 
gained from the sea : " There is a doubtful appearance 
of a soil beginning to be formed. It is styled doubtful^ 
because it would not be jDbserved by every eye, and per- 
haps not acknowledged by many." We thought that 
this would not be a bad description of the greater part of 
the Cape. There is a "beach" on the west side of 
Eastham, which we crossed the next summer, half a mile 
wide, and stretching across the township, containing 
seventeen hundred acres, on which there is not now a 
particle of vegetable mould, though it formerly produced 
wheat. All sands are here called "beaches," whether 
they are waves of wjiter or of air, that dash against 



THE PLAINS OF NAUSET. 33 

them, since they commonly have their origin on the shore. 
" The sand in some places," says the historian of East- 
ham, "lodging against the beach-grass, has been raised 
into hills fifty feet high, where twenty-fi\^e years ago no 
hills existed. In others it has filled up small valleys, 
and swamps. Where a strong rooted bush stood, the 
appearance is singular : a mass of earth and sand ad- 
heres to it, resembling a small tower. In several places, 
rocks, which were formerly covered with soil, are dis- 
closed, and being lashed by the sand, driven against them 
by the wind, look as if they were recently dug from a 
quarry." 

We were surprised to hear of the great crops of corn 
which are still raised in Eastham, notwithstanding the 
real and apparent barrenness. Our landlord in Orleans 
,had told us that he raised three or four hundred bushels 
of corn annually, and also of the great number of pigs 
which he fattened. In Champlain's " Voyages," there 
is a plate representing the Indian cornfields hereabouts, 
with their wigwams in the midst, as they appeared in 
1605, and it was here that the Pilgrims, to quote their 
own words, " bought eight or ten hogsheads of corn and 
beans" of the Nauset Indians, in 1622, to keep them- 
selves from starving.* " In 1667 the town [of Eastham] 

♦ They touched after this at a place called Mattachiest, where they 
got more corn j but their shallop being cast away in a storm, tho 
Governor was obliged to return to Plymouth on foot, fifty miles 
through the woods. According to Mourt's Kelation, " he came safely 
home, though weary and surbated,^^ that is, foot-sore. (Ital. sobattere^ 
Lat. &ub or soha battere, to bruise the soles of the feet ; v. Die. 
Not " from acerbatus, embittered or aggrieved," as one commentator 
on this passage supposes.) This word is of very rare occurrence, 
being applied only to governors and persons of like description, who 
are in that predicament ; though such generally have considerable 
mileage allowed them, and might save their soles if they cared. 
2* O 



34 CAPE COD. 

voted that every housekeeper should kill twelve black- 
birds or three crows, which did great damage to the corn ; 
and this vote was repeated for many years." In 1695 
an additional order was passed, namely, that " every un- 
married man in the township shall kill six blackbirds, or 
three crows, while he remains single ; as a penalty for 
not doing it, shall not be married until he obey this 
order." The blackbirds, however, still molest the corn. 
I saw them at it the next summer, and there were many 
scarecrows, if not scare-blackbirds, in the fields, which I 
often mistook for men. From which I concluded, that 
either many men were not married, or many blackbirds 
were. Yet they put but three or four kernels in a hill, 
and let fewer plants remain than we do. In the account 
of Eastham, in the " Historical Collections," printed in 
1802, it is said, that "more corn is produced than the 
inhabitants consume, and about a thousand bushels are 
annually sent to market. The soil being free from 
stones, a plough passes through it speedily ; and after the 
corn has come up, a small Cape horse, somewhat larger 
than a goat, will, with the assistance of two boys, easily 
hoe three or four acres in a day ; several farmers are 
accustomed to produce five hundred bushels of grain an- 
nually, and not long since one raised eight hundred 
bushels on sixty acres." Similar accounts are given to- 
day ; indeed, the recent accounts are in some instances 
suspectable repetitions of the old, and I have no doubt 
that their statements are as often founded on the excep- 
tion as the rule, and that by far the greater number of 
acres are as barren as they appear to be. It is suffi- 
ciently remarkable that any crops can be raised here, 
and it may be owing, as others have suggested, to the 
amount of moisture in the atmosphere, the warmth of 



THE PLAINS OF NAUSET. 35 

the sand, and the rareness of frosts. A miller, who was 
sharpening his stones, told me that, forty years ago, he 
had been to a husking here, where five hundred bushels 
were husked in one evening, and the corn was piled six 
feet high or more, in the midst, but now, fifteen or 
eighteen bushels to an acre were an average yield. I 
never saw fields of such puny and unpromising looking 
corn, as in this town. Probably the inhabitants are con- 
tented with small crops from a great surface easily 
cultivated. It is not always the most fertile land that is 
the most profitable, and this sand may repay cultivation, 
as well as the fertile bottoms of the West. It is said, 
moreover, that the vegetables raised in the sand, without 
manure, are remarkably sweet, the pumpkins especially, 
though when their seed is planted in the interior they 
soon degenerate. I can testify that the vegetables here, 
when they succeed at all, look remarkably green and 
healthy, though perhaps it is partly by contrast with the 
sand. Yet the inhabitants of the Cape towns, generally, 
do not raise their own meal or pork. Their gardens are 
commonly little patches, that have been redeemed from 
the edges of the marshes and swamps. 

All the morning we had heard the sea roar on the 
eastern shore, which was several miles distant ; for it 
still felt the effects of the storm in which the St. John 
was wrecked, — though a school-boy, whom we overtook, 
hardly knew what we meant, his ears were so used to it. 
He would have more plainly heard the same sound in 
a shell. It was a very inspiriting sound to walk by, fill- 
ing the whole air, that of the sea dashing against the 
land, heard several miles inland. Instead of having a 
dog to growl before your door, to have an Atlantic Ocean 
to growl for a whole Cape ! On the whole, we were glad 



36 CAPE COD. 

of the storm, which would show us the ocean in its 
angriest mood. Charles Darwin was assured that the 
roar of the surf on the coast of Chiloe, after a heavy- 
gale, could be heard at night a distance of ''21 sea miles 
across a hilly and wooded country." . We conversed 
with the boy we have mentioned, who might have been 
eight years old, making him walk the while under the 
lee of our umbrella ; for we thought it as important to 
know what was life on the Cape to a boy as to a man. 
We learned from him where the best grapes were to be 
found in that neighborhood. He was carrying his dinner 
in a pail ; and, without any impertinent questions being 
put by us, it did at length appear of what it consisted. 
The homeliest facts are always the most acceptable to 
an inquiring mind. At length, before we got to East- 
ham meeting-house, we left the road and struck across 
the country for the eastern shore at Nauset Lights, — 
three lights close together, two or three miles distant 
from us. They were so many that they might be dis- 
tinguished from others ; but this seemed a shiftless and 
costly way of accomplishing that object. We found 
ourselves at once on an apparently boundless plain, 
without a tree or a fence, or, with one or two exceptions, 
a house in sight. Instead of fences, the earth was some- 
times thrown up into a slight ridge. My companion 
compared it to the rolling prairies of Illinois. In the 
storm of wind and rain which raged when we traversed 
it, it no doubt appeared more vast and desolate than it 
really is. As there were no hills, but only here and 
there a dry hollow in the midst of the waste, and the 
distant horizon was concealed by mist, we did not know 
whether it was high or low. A solitary traveller, whom 
we saw perambulating in the distance, loomed like a 



THE PLAINS OF NAUSET. 37 

giant. He appeared to walk slouchinglj, as if held up 
from above by straps under his shoulders, as much as 
supported by the plain below. Men and boys would 
have appeared alike at a little distance, there being no 
object by which to measure them. Indeed, to an in- 
lander, the Cape landscape is a constant mirage. This 
kind of country extended a mile or two each way. These 
were the ** Plains of Nauset," once covered with wood, 
where in winter the winds howl and the snow blows 
right merrily in the face of the traveller. I was glad to 
have got out of the towns, where I am wont to feel un- 
speakably mean and disgraced, — to have left behind me 
for a season the bar-rooms of Massachusetts, where the 
full-grown are not weaned from savage and filthy hab- 
its, — still sucking a cigar. My spirits rose in propor- 
tion to the outward dreariness. The towns need to be 
ventilated. The gods would be pleased to see some pure 
flames from their altars. They are not to be appeased 
with cigar-smoke. 

As we thus skirted the back-side of the towns, for we 
did not enter any village, till we got to Provincetown, 
we read their histories under our umbrellas, rarely meet- 
ing anybody. The old accounts are the richest in topog- 
raphy, which was what we wanted most ; and, indeed, 
in most things else, for I find that the readable parts of 
the modern accounts of these towns consist, in a great 
measure, of quotations, acknowledged and unacknowl- 
edged, from the older ones, without any additional infor- 
mation of equal interest; — town histories, which at 
length run into a history of the Church of that place, 
that being the only story they have to tell, and conclude 
by quoting the Latin epitaphs of the old pastors, having 
been written in the good old days of Latin and of Greek. 



38 CAPE COD. 

They will go back to the ordination of every minister, 
and tell you faithfully who made the introductory prayer, 
and who delivered the sermon ; who made the ordaining 
prayer, and who gave the charge ; who extended the 
right hand of fellowship, and who pronounced the bene- 
diction ; also how many ecclesiastical councils convened 
from time to time to inquire into the orthodoxy of some 
minister, and the names of all who composed them. As 
it will take us an hour to get over this plain, and there 
is no variety in the prospect, peculiar as it is, I will read 
a little in the history of Eastham the while. 

When the committee from Plymouth had purchased 
the territory of Eastham of the Indians, "it was de- 
manded, who laid claim to Billingsgate ? " which was un- 
derstood to be all that part of the Cape north of what 
they had purchased. " The answer was, there was not 
any who owned it. ' Then,' said the committee, ' that 
land is ours.' The Indians answered, that it was." This 
was a remarkable assertion and admission. The Pilgrims 
appear to have regarded themselves as Not Any's repre- 
sentatives. Perhaps this was the first instance of that 
quiet way of " speaking for " a place not yet occupied, 
or at least not improved as much as it may be, which 
their descendants have practised, and are still practising 
so extensively. Not Any seems to have been the sole 
proprietor of all America before the Yankees. But his- 
tory says, that when the Pilgrims had held the lands of 
Billingsgate many years, at length, " appeared an Indian, 
who styled himself Lieutenant Anthony," who laid claim 
to them, and of him they bought them. Who knows 
but a Lieutenant Anthony may be knocking at the door 
of the White House some day ? At any rate, I know 
that if you hold a thing unjustly, there will surely be 
the devil to pay at last. • 



THE PLAINS OF NAUSET. 39 

Thomas Prince, who was several times the governor 
of the Plymouth colony, was the leader of the settlement 
of Eastham. There was recently standing, on what was 
once his farm, in this town, a pear-tree which is said to 
have been brought from England, and planted there by 
him, about two hundred years ago. It was blown down 
a few months before we were there. A late account 
says that it was recently in a vigorous state ; the fruit 
small, but excellent ; and it yielded on an average fifteen 
bushels. Some appropriate lines have been addressed 
to it, by a Mr. Heman Doane, from which I will quote, 
partly because they are the only specimen of Cape Cod 
verse which I remember to have seen, and partly because 
they are not bad. 

" Two hundred years have, on the wings of Time, 

Passed with their joys and woes, since thou, Old Tree I 
Put forth thy first leaves in this foreign clime, 
Transplanted from the soil beyond the sea. 
***** 

[These stars represent the more clerical lines, and 
also those which have deceased.] 

" That exiled band long since have passed away, 
And still. Old Tree ! thou standest in the place 
Where Prince's hand did plant thee in his day, — 

An undesigned memorial of his race 
And time; of those our honored fathers, w^hen 

They came from Plymouth o'er and settled here; 
Doane, Higgins, Snow, and other worthy men. 
Whose names their sons remember to revere. 
* * » * 

" Old Time has thinned thy boughs. Old Pilgrim Tree! 
And bowed thee with the weight of many years; 
Yet, 'mid the frosts of age, thy bloom we see, 
And yearly still thy mellow fruit appears." 

There are some other lines which I might quote, if 



40 OAri: oon. 

thoy weiv not tiod to unworthy ooinpanious, by tlio 
rhyme. "VVluni one ox will Ho vlown. tlio yoke boai-s 
hai\l on hun tliat j^tands np. 

One of the tii-st sotiloi-s ot Kasthani Nva?^ Doaoon .lolui 
l\>ane, who iliod in 1707, auvd one hnndivil ami ton. 
Tn^ditioii says that ho wjvs ivolvOvl in a oradio several of 
his last yeai*!*. That, eertainly, was not an Aohilleau 
lite. I lis mother mnst have let him slip when she dip- 
ped him into the lii|nor whioh was to make him invul- 
nemble, and he went in, heels and all. Some of tho 
8tont^lK>unds to his farm, whieh he sc( np. are standing 
to-ilay, with his initials ent in them. 

The eeelesiastieal history of this town intt rested us 
somewhat. It appears that " thoy very early built a 
iimall meeting-house, twonty t'eet square, with a thatehed 
i\H>f thivuiih whieh tJiey miu;ht liiv their muskets," — of 
i\>urse, at the IVvil. "In UU»2, the town agived that 
a jv»rt of every whale east on shoiv be appivpriatod for 
the supjH>rt of the nnnistry." Iso doubt there seemed 
to be some pivpriety in thus leaving the support of 
the ministers to riwidenee, whose servaiits they ait>, 
and who alone rules the storn\s ; tbr. when tew whales 
weit) east up, they might suspeet that their woi-ship 
wjis not aeeeptable. The n\inisters must have Siit upon 
the elitVs in every storm, a'.ul waioluHi the shore with 
anxiety. And, tor n\y part, if 1 weiv a minister, I 
would n\ther trust to the bowels of the billows, on the 
biiok-side of Caj>e Cvxl, to east up a whale foi* me, than 
to the generosity of many a eountry jvarish that 1 know. 
You eannot say of a eomitry minister's salary, ivnnnonly, 
that it is " very like a whale." Nevertheless, the minis- 
ter who depeud^nl on w hales east up must have h.nd a 
tTYUig time of it. I would railier have gone to the Falk- 



THE PLAIS» OF XAU«ET, 41 

hmd Iskf with a harpoon, afi4 done with it. Think r/f 
a whale liaving Ui« breath of life heat^m oot of him t>j 
a iUfnOf an/1 tira^/^n^ in ov';r th'j J^an and gaz^U^, for 
Uwj sap[K;rt of t^i* minhtry I Wliat a eoo«o!a:i//n ii 
roui»t liave l>een to him ! I have lieard o( a minii>ter, 
who ha/1 f>een a fUberman, being aeiiUA in Bridgewaler 
for a^ long a time an be conld tell a cod frota a had/loek« 
G*merou» a?* it «/rem»^ thw condition would emjyt/ mo^t 
ctniuiry pulpits forthwith, for it in long eince the ft«ber» 
of men were ii4t*tntuifu Abo, a dut^ wa« pot on oia^;k' 
erel here to ¥M\t\tffn a fWie-*<;W4 ; in other wonk, the 
ina/;kerel-«':hor^l wa* tax'i^l in order that the cliildren'if 
school migljt he fruiu **ln 1665 tlie Coart pamed a 
law to ntiVuti ('/jr\tfjn\ ptmhhment on all penM>n)(^ who 
TttMfA in the t/>wn« of tlii« government, who denied the 
Scriptare*.** Think of a man being whif;ped on a spring 
morning, till he wa£ constrained to er>nfefi» tliat the 
Scriptures were true ! ** It wa« abo voted bj the town, 
tliat all persons who sboold stand out of the meeting- 
bou«e during the time of dirine strviee should be set in 
the nUMtkji/* h behooved such a town to see that sluing 
in tlie meeting4ioase was nothii^ akin to sitting in the 
stocks, le?,t the penalt j of obedience to the law miglit be 
greater than tljat of di^^b'^ience. This was the £a^ 
bam fiunoos of late jears for its eamp-meetii^^ held in 
a grove near hj, to whidi thoosands flock fix»m all parts 
of the Bay. We conjecturerl tliat the reason for the 
perhaps unuimal, if not unhealthful deveh^pment of the 
religious sentimf;nt here, wa^ the fa/;t tl«at a large por- 
tion of tlie population are women whose bnsbawU and 
sons are either al/road on the sea, or dse drowned^ and 
there is nobod^r but they and the minifters left behind. 
The old account eajs that '^ hysteric fits are very com- 



42 CAPE COD. 

mon in Orleans, Eastham, and the towns below, partic- 
ularly on Sunday, in the times of divine service. When 
one woman is affected, five or six others generally sym- 
pathize with her ; and the congregation is thrown into 
the utmost confusion. Several old men suppose, un- 
philosophically and uncharitably, perhaps, that the will 
is partly concerned, and that ridicule and threats would 
liave a tendency to prevent the evil." How this is now 
we did not learn. We saw one singularly masculine 
woman, however, in a house on this very plain, who did 
not look as if she was ever troubled with hysterics, or 
sympathized with those that were; or, perchance, life 
itself was to her a hysteric fit, — a Nauset woman, of a 
hardness and coarseness such as no man ever possesses 
or suggests. It was enough to see the vertebrae and 
sinews of her neck, and her set jaws of iron, which 
would have bitten a board-nail in two in their ordinary 
action, — braced against the world, talking like a man- 
of-war's-man in petticoats, or as if shouting to you 
through a breaker ; who looked as if it made her head 
ache to live ; hard enough for any enormity. I looked 
upon her as one who had committed infanticide ; who 
never had a brother, unless it were some wee thing that 
died in infancy, — for what need of him ? — and whose 
father must have died before she was born. This wo- 
man told us that the camp-meetings were not held the 
previous summer for fear of introducing the cholera, and 
that they would have been held earher this summer, but 
the rye was so backward that straw would not have been 
ready for them ; for they lie in straw. There are some- 
times one hundred and fifty ministers, (!) and five thou- 
sand hearers, assembled. The ground, which is called 
Millennium Grove, is owned by a company in Boston, 



THE PLAINS OF NAUSET. 43 

and is the most suitable, or ratlier unsuitable, for this 
purpose of any that I saw on the Cape. It is fenced, 
and the frames of the tents are, at all times, to be seen 
interspersed among the oaks. They have an oven and 
a pump, and keep all their kitchen utensils and tent 
coverings and furniture in a permanent building on the 
spot. They select a time for their meetings when the 
moon is fuH. A man is appointed to clear out the pump 
a week beforehand, while the ministers are clearing their 
throats ; but, probably, the latter do not always deliver 
as pure a stream as the former. I saw the heaps of 
clam-shells left under the tables, where they had feasted 
in previous summers, and supposed, of course, that that 
was the work of the unconverted, or the backsliders and 
scoffers. It looked as if a camp-meeting must be a sin- 
gular combination of a prayer-meeting and a picnic. 

The first minister settled here was the Rev. Samuel 
Treat, in 1672, a gentleman who is said to be " entitled 
to a distinguished rank among the evangelists of New 
England." He converted many Indians, as well ^ 
white men, in his day, and translated the Confession of 
Faith into the Nauset language. These were the In- 
dians concerning whom their first teacher, Richard 
Bourne, wrote to Gookin, in 1674, that he had been to 
see one who was sick, " and there came from him very 
savory and heavenly expressions," but, with regard to 
the mass of them, he says, "the truth is, that many 
of them are very loose in their course, to my heart- 
breaking sorrow." Mr. Treat is described as a Calvinist 
of the strictest kind, not one of those who, by giving up 
or explaining away, become like a porcupine disarmed 
of its quills, but a consistent Calvinist, who can dart his 
quills to a distance and courageously defend himself. 



44 CAPE COD. 

There exists a volume of his sermons in manuscript, 
" which," sajs a commentator, " appear to have been 
designed for publication." I quote the following sen- 
tences at second hand, from a Discourse on Luke xvi. 
23, addressed to sinners : — 

" Thou must erelong go to the bottomless pit. Hell 
hath enlarged herself, and is ready to receive thee. 
There is room enough for thy entertainment 

" Consider, thou art going to a place prepared by God 
on purpose to exalt his justice in, — a place made for no 
other employment but torments. Hell is God's house 
of correction ; and, remember, God doth all things like 
himself. When God would show his justice, and what 
is the weight of his wrath, he makes a hell where it 

shall, indeed, appear to purpose Woe to thy soul 

when thou shalt be set up as a butt for the arrows of the 
Almighty 

" Consider, God himself shall be the principal agent 
in thy misery, — his breath is the bellows which blows 
up the flame of hell forever ; — and if he punish thee, 
if he meet thee in his fury, he wdll not meet thee as 
a man ; he will give thee an omnipotent blow." 

" Some think sinning ends with this life ; but it is 
a mistake. The creature is held under an everlasting 
law ; the damned increase in sin in hell. Possibly, the 
mention of this may please thee. But, remember, there 
shall be no pleasant sins there ; no eating, drinking, 
singing, dancing, wanton dalliance, and drinking stolen 
waters : but damned sins, bitter, hellish sins ; sins ex- 
asperated by torments, cursing God, spite, rage, and 
blasphemy. — The guilt of all thy sins shall be laid 

upon thy soul, and be made so many heaps of fuel 

," Sinner, I beseech thee, reaHze the truth of these 



THE PLAINS OF NAUSET. 45 

things. Do not go about to dream that this is de- 
rogatory to God's mercy, and nothing but a vain fable 
to scare children out of their wits withal. God can be 
merciful, though he make thee miserable. He shall 
have monuments enough of that precious attribute, shin- 
ing like stars in the place of glory, and singing eternal 
hallelujahs to the praise of Him that redeemed them, 
though, to exalt the power of his justice, he damn sin- 
ners heaps upon heaps." 

"But," continues the same writer, " with the advan- 
tage of proclaiming the doctrine of terror, which is nat- 
urally productive of a sublime and impressive style of 
eloquence (' Triumphat ventoso glorice curru orator, 
qui pectus angit, irritat, et implet terroribus.' Vid. 
Burnet, De Stat. Mort., p. 309), he could not attain 
the character of a popular preacher. His voice was so 
loud, that it could be heard at a great distance from the 
meeting-house, even amidst the shrieks of hysterical 
women, and the winds that howled over the plains of 
Nauset ; but there was no more music in it than in the 
discordant sounds with which it was mingled." 

" The effect of such preaching," it is said, " was that 
his hearers were several times, in the course of his min- 
istry, awakened and alarmed ; and on one occasion a 
comparatively innocent young man was frightened nearly 
out of his wits, and Mr. Treat had to exert himself to 
make hell seem somewhat cooler to him " ; yet we are 
assured that " Treat's manners were cheerful, his con- 
versation pleasant, and sometimes facetious, but always 
decent. He was fond of a stroke of humor, and a prac- 
tical joke, and manifested his relish for them by long 
and loud fits of laughter." 

This was the man of whom a well-known anecdote is 



46 CAPE COD. 

told, which doubtless many of my readers have heard, 
but which, nevertheless, I will venture to quote : — 

" After his marriage with the daughter of Mr. Willard 
(pastor of the South Church in Boston), he was some- 
times invited by that gentleman to preach in his pulpit. 
Mr. Willard possessed a graceful delivery, a masculine 
and harmonious voice ; and, though he did not gain 
much reputation by his * Body of Divinity,' which is 
frequently sneered at, particularly by those who have 
read it, yet in his sermons are strength of thought and 
energy of language. The natural consequence was that 
he was generally admired. Mr. Treat having preached 
one of his best discourses to the congregation of his 
father-in-law, in his usual unhappy manner, excited uni- 
versal disgust; and several nice judges waited on Mr. 
"Willard, and begged that Mr. Treat, who was a worthy, 
pious man, it was true, but a wretched preacher, might 
never be invited into his pulpit again. To this request 
Mr. Willard made no reply ; but he desired his son-in- 
law to lend him the discourse ; which, being left with 
him, he delivered it without alteration to his people a 
few weeks after. They ran to Mr. Willard and request- 
ed a copy for the press. ' See the difference,' they 
cried, ' between yourself and your son-in-law ; you have 
preached a sermon on the same text as Mr. Treat's, but 
whilst his was contemptible, yours is excellent.' As 
is observed in a note, * Mr. Willard, after producing the 
sermon in the handwriting of Mr. Treat, might have 
addressed these sage critics in the words of Phsedrus, 

* En hie declarat, quales sitis judices.' " * 

Mr. Treat died of a stroke of the palsy, just after the 

* Lib. V. Fab. 6. 



THE PLAINS OF NAUSET. 47 

memorable storm known as the Great Snow, which left 
the ground around his house entirely bare, but heaped up 
the snow in the road to an uncommon height. Through 
this an arched way was dug, by which the Indians bore 
his body to the grave. 

The reader will imagine us, all the while, steadily 
traversing that extensive plain in a direction a little 
north of east toward Nauset Beach, and reading under 
our umbrellas as we sailed, while it blowed hard with 
mingled mist and rain, as if we were approaching a fit 
anniversary of Mr. Treat's funeral. We fancied that 
it was such a moor as that on which somebody perished 
in the snow, as is related in the " Lights and Shadows 
of Scottish Life." 

The next minister settled here was the " Rev. Samuel 
Osborn, who was born in Ireland, and educated at the 
University of Dublin." He is said to have been " A 
man of wisdom and virtue," and taught his people the 
use of peat, and the art of drying and preparing it, 
which as they had scarcely any other fuel, was a great 
blessing to them. He also introduced improvements in 
agriculture. But, notwithstanding his many services, 
as he embraced the religion of Arminius, some of his 
flock became dissatisfied. At length, an ecclesiastical 
council, consisting of ten ministers, with their churches, 
sat upon him, and they, naturally enough, spoiled his 
usefulness. The council convened at the desire of two 
divine philosophers, — Joseph Doane and Nathaniel 
Freeman. 

In their report they say, " It appears to the council 
that the Rev. Mr. Osborn hath, in his preaching to this 
people, said, that what Christ did and suffered doth 
nothing abate or diminish our obligation to obey the 



48 CAPE COD. 

law of God, and that Christ's suffering and obedience 
were for Iiimself ; both parts of which, we think, con- 
tain dangerous error." 

" Also : * It hath been said, and doth appear to this 
council, that the Rev. Mr. Osborn, both in public and 
in private, asserted that there are no promises in the 
Bible but what are conditional, which we think, also, 
to be an error, and do say that there are promises which 
are absolute and without any condition, — such as the 
promise of a new heart, and that he will write his law 
in our hearts.'" 

" Also, they say, ' it hath been alleged, and doth appear 
to us, that Mr. Osborn hath declared, that obedience is 
a considerable cause of a person's justification, which, 
we think, contains very dangerous error.' " 

And many the like distinctions they made, such as 
some of my readers, probably, are more familiar with 
than I am. So, far in the East, among the Yezidis, or 
Worshippers of the Devil, so-called, the Chaldaeans, and 
others, according to the testimony of travellers, you 
may still hear these remarkable disputations on doc- 
trinal points going on. Osborn was, accordingly, dis- 
missed, and he removed to Boston, where he kept school 
for many years. But he was fully justified, methinks, 
by his works in the peat-meadow ; one proof of which 
is, that he lived to be between ninety and one hundred 
years old. 

The next minister was the Rev. Benjamin "Webb, of 
whom, though a neighboring clergyman pronounced him 
"the best man and the best minister whom he ever 
knew," yet the historian says, that, 

" As he spent his days in the uniform discharge of 
his duty (It reminds one of a country muster) and 



THE PLAINS OF NAUSET. 49 

there were no shades to give relief to his character, not 
much can be said of him. (Pity the Devil did not plant 
a few shade-trees along his avenues.) His heart was 
as pure as the new«fallen snow, which completely covers 
every dark spot in a field ; his mind was as serene as 
the sky in a mild evening in June, when the moon 
shines without a cloud. Name any virtue, and that 
virtue he practised; name any vice, and that vice he 
shunned. But if peculiar qualities marked his char-, 
acter, they were his humility, his gentleness, and his 
love of God. The people had long been taught by a 
son of thunder (Mr. Treat) : in him they were in- 
structed by a son of consolation, who sweetly allured 
them to virtue by soft persuasion, and by exhibiting 
the mercy of the Supreme Being ; for his thoughts 
were so much in heaven, that ihey seldom descended 
to the dismal regions below ; and though of the same 
religious sentiments as Mr. Treat, yet his attention 
was turned to those glad tidings of great joy which 
a Saviour came to publish." 

We were interested to hear that such a man had trod- 
den the plains of Nauset. 

Turning over further in our book, our eyes fell on the 
name of the Rev. Jonathan Bascom, of Orleans : " Senex 
emunctse naris, doctus, et auctor elegantium verborum, 
facetus, et dulcis festique sermonis." And, again, on 
that of the Rev. Nathan Stone, of Dennis : " Vir humilis, 
mitis, blandus, advenarum hospes ; (there was need of 
him there ;) suis commodis in terra non studens, recon- 
ditis thesauris in coelo." An easy virtue that, there, for 
methinks no inhabitant of Dennis could be very studious 
about his earthly commodity, but must regard the bulk 
of his treasures as in heaven. But probably the most 

3 D 



50 CAPE COD. 

just and pertinent character of all is that which appears 
to be given to the Rev. Ephraira Briggs, of Chatham, 
in the language of the later Romans, " Seip, sepoese, 
sepocmese, wechehim,'" — which not being interpreted, 
we know not what it means, though we have no doubt 
it occurs somewhere in the Scriptures, probably in the 
Apostle Eliot's Epistle to the Nipmuck*?. 

Let no one think that I do not love the old ministers. 
They were, probably, the best men of their generation, 
and they deserve that their biographies should fill the 
pages of the town histories. If I could but hear the 
" glad tidings " of which they tell, and which, perchance, 
they heard, I might write in a worthier strain than 
this. 

There was no better way to make the reader realize 
how wide and peculiar that plain was, and how long 
it took to traverse it, than by inserting these extracts 
in the midst of my narrative. 



IV. 
THE BEACH. 



At length we reached the seemingly retreating boun- 
dary of the plain, and entered what had appeared at 
a distance an upland marsh, but proved to be dry sand 
covered with Beach-grass, the Bearberry, Bayberry, 
Shrub-oaks, and Beach-plum, slightly ascending as we ap- 
proached the shore ; then, crossing over a belt of sand on 
which nothing grew, though the roar of the sea sounded 
scarcely louder than before, and we were prepared to go 
half a mile farther, we suddenly stood on the edge of a 
bluff overlooking the Atlantic. Far below us was the 
beach, from half a dozen to a dozen rods in width, with 
a long line of breakers rushing to the strand. The sea 
was exceedingly dark and stormy, the sky completely 
overcast, the clouds still dropping rain, and the wind 
seemed to blow not so much as the exciting cause, as 
from sympathy with the already agitated ocean. The 
waves broke on the bars at some distance from the shore, 
and curving green or yellow as if over so many unseen 
dams, ten or twelve feet high, like a thousand waterfalls, 
rolled in foam to the sand. There was nothing but that 
savage ocean between us and Europe. 

Having got down the bank, and as close to the water 
as we could, where the sand was the hardest, leaving the 



52 CAPE COD. • 

Nauset Lights behind us, we began to walk leisurely up 
the beach, in a northwest direction, toward Province- 
town, which was about twenty-five miles distant, still 
sailing under our umbrellas with a strong aft wind, ad- 
miring in silence, as we walked, the great force of the 
ocean stream, — 

TVOTaiioio [Jieya adevos ^^Keavolo. 

The white breakers were rushing to the shore ; the foam 
ran up the sand, and then ran back as far as we could 
see (and we imagined how much farther along the At- 
lantic coast, before and behind us), as regularly, to com- 
pare great things with small, as the master of a choir 
beats time with his white wand ; and ever and anon a 
higher wave caused us hastily to deviate from our path, 
and we looked back on our tracks filled with water and 
foam. The breakers looked like droves of a thousand 
wild horses of Neptune, rushing to the shore, with their 
white manes streaming far behind ; and when, at length, 
the sun shone for a moment, their manes were rainbow- 
tinted. Also, the long kelp-weed was tossed up from 
time to time, like the tails of sea-cows sporting in the 
brine. 

There was not a sail in sight, and we saw none that 
day, — for they had all sought harbors in the late storm, 
and had not been able to get out again ; and the only 
human beings whom we saw on the beach for several 
days, were one or two wreckers looking for drift-wood, 
and fragments of wrecked vessels. After an easterly 
storm in the spring, this beach is sometimes strewn with 
eastern wood from one end to the other, which, as it 
belongs to him who saves it, and the Cape is nearly des- 
titute of wood, is a Godsend to the inhabitants. Wo 



THE BEACH. 53 

soon met one of these wreckers, — a regular Cape Cod 
man, with whom we parleyed, with a bleached and 
weather-beaten face, within whose wrinkles I distin- 
guished no particular feature. It was like an old sail 
endowed with life, — a hanging-cliff of weather-beaten 
flesh, — like one of the clay bowlders which occurred in 
that sand-bank. He had on a hat which had seen salt 
water, and a coat of many pieces and colors, though it 
was mainly the color of the beach, as if it had been 
sanded. His variegated back — for his coat had many 
patches, even between the shoulders — was a rich study 
to us, when we had passed him and looked round. It 
might have been dishonorable for him to have so many 
scars behind, it is true, if he had not had many more 
and more serious ones in front. He looked as if he 
sometimes saw a doughnut, but never descended to com- 
fort ; too grave to laugh, too tough to cry ; as indifferent 
as a clam, — like a sea-clam with hat on and legs, that was 
out walking the strand. He may have been one of the 
Pilgrims, — Peregrine White, at least, — who has kept 
on the back side of the Cape, and let the centuries go 
by. He was looking for wrecks, old logs, water-logged 
and covered with barnacles, or bits of boards and joists, 
even chips which he drew out of the reach of the tide, 
and stacked up to dry. When the log was too large to 
carry far, he cut it up where the last wave had left it, or 
rolling it a few feet, appropriated it by sticking two sticks 
into the ground crosswise above it. Some rotten trunk, 
which in Maine cumbers the ground, and is, perchance, 
thrown into the water on purpose, is here thus carefully 
picked up, split and dried, and husbanded. Before win- 
ter the wrecker painfully carries these things up the bank 
on liis shoulders by a long^ diagonal slanting path made 



54 CAPE COD. 

with a hoe in the sand, if there is no hollow at hand. You 
may see his hooked pike-staff always lying on the bank 
ready for use. He is the true monarch of the beach, 
whose "right there is none to dispute," and he is as 
much identified with it as a beach-bird. 

Crantz, in his account of Greenland, quotes Dalagen's 
relation of the ways and usages of the Greenlanders, 
and says, " Whoever finds drift-wood, or the spoils of a 
shipwreck on the strand, enjoys it as his own, though he 
does not live therig. But he must haul it ashore and lay 
a stone upon it, as a token that some one has taken pos- 
session of it, and this stone is the deed of security, for 
no other Greenlander will offer to meddle with it after- 
wards." Such is the instinctive law of nations. We 
have also this account of drift-wood in Crantz : " As 
he (the Founder of Nature) has denied this frigid rocky 
region the growth of trees, he has bid the streams of the 
Ocean to convey to its shores a great deal of wood, which 
accordingly comes floating thither, part without ice, but 
the most part along with it, and lodges itself between the 
islands. Were it not for tliis, we Europeans should have 
no wood to burn there, and the poor Greenlanders (who, 
it is true, do not use wood, but train, for burning) would, 
however, have no wood to roof their houses, to erect 
their tents, as also to build their boats, and to shaft their 
arrows, (yet there grew some small but crooked alders, 
&c.,) by which they must procure their maintenance, 
clothing and train for warmth, light, and cooking. Among 
this wood are great trees torn up by the roots, which by 
driving up and down for many years and rubbing on the 
ice, are quite bare of branches and bark, and corroded 
with great wood-worms. A small part of this drift- 
wood are willows, alder and birch trees, which come out 



THE BEACH. 55. 

of the bays in the south (i. e. of Greenland) ; also large 
trunks of aspen-trees, which must come from a greater 
distance ; but the greatest part is pine and fir. We find 
also a good deal of a sort of wood finely veined, with 
few branches ; this I fancy is larch-wood, which likes to 
decorate the sides of lofty, stony mountains. There is 
also a solid, reddish wood, of a more agreeable fragrance 
than the common fir, with visible cross-veins ; which I 
take to be the same species as the beautiful silver-firs, or 
zirhel, that have the .smell of cedar, and grow on the 
high Grison hills, and the Switzers wainscot their rooms 
with them." The wrecker directed us to a slight depres- 
sion, called Snow's Hollow, by which we ascended the 
bank, — for elsewhere, if not difficult, it was inconvenient 
to chmb it on account of the sliding sand, which filled 
our shoes. 

This sand-bank — the backbone of the Cape — rose 
directly from the beach to the height of a hundred feet or 
more above the ocean. It was with singular emotions 
that we first stood upon it and discovered what a place 
we had chosen to walk 6n. On our right, beneath us, 
was the beach of smooth and gently-sloping sand, a 
dozen rods in width ; next, the endless series of white 
breakers ; further still, the light green water over the 
bar, which runs the whole length of the forearm of the 
Cape, and beyond this stretched the unwearied and 
illimitable ocean. On our left, extending back from the 
very edge of the bank, was a perfect desert of shining 
sand, from thirty to eighty rods in width, skirted in the 
distance by small sand-hills fifteen or twenty feet high ; 
between which, however, in some places, the sand pene- 
trated as much farther. Next commenced the region of 
vegetation, — a succession of small hills and valleys cov- 



56 * CAPE COD. 

ered with shrubbery, now glowing with the brightest 
imaginable autumnal tints ; and beyond this were seen, 
here and there, the waters of the bay. Here, in Well- 
fleet, this pure sand plateau, known to sailors as the 
Table Lands of Eastham, on account of its appearance, 
as seen from the ocean, and because it once made a part 
of that town, — full fifty rods in width, and in many 
places much more, and sometimes full one hundred 
and fifty feet above the ocean, — stretched away north- 
ward from the southern boundary of the town, without 
a particle of vegetation, — as level almost as a table, — 
for two and a half or three miles, or as far as the eye 
could reach ; slightly rising towards the ocean, then 
stooping to the beach, by as steep a slope as sand could 
lie on, and as regular as a military engineer could desire. 
It was like the escarped rampart of a stupendous for- 
tress, whose glacis was the beach, and whose champaign 
the ocean, — From its surface we overlooked the greater 
part of the Cape. In short, we were traversing a desert, 
with the view of an autumnal landscape of extraordmaiy 
brilliancy, a sort of Promised ' Land, on the one hand, 
and the ocean on the other. Yet, though the prospect 
was so extensive, and the country for the most part des- 
titute of trees, a house was rarely visible, — we never 
saw one from the beach, — and the solitude was that of the 
ocean and the desert combined. A thousand men could 
not have seriously interrupted it, but would have been 
lost in the vastness of the scenery as their footsteps in 
the sand. 

The whole coast is so free from rocks, that we saw 
but one or two for more than twenty miles. The sand 
was soft like the beach, and trying to the eyes, when the 
sun shone. A few piles of drift-wood, which some wreck- 



THE BEACH. 57 

ers had painfully brought up the bank and stacked up 
there to dry, being the only objects in the desert, looked 
indefinitely large and distant, even like wigwams, though, 
when we stood near them, they proved to be insignificant 
little "jags" of wood. 

For sixteen miles, commencing at the Nauset Lights, 
the bank held its height, though farther north it was not 
so level as here, but interrupted by slight hollows, and 
the patches of Beach-grass and Bayberry frequently crept 
into the sand to its edge. There are some pages entitled 
" A Description of the Eastern Coast of the County of 
Barnstable," printed in 1802, pointing out the spots on 
which the Trustees of the Humane Society have erected 
huts called Charity or Humane Houses, "and other 
places where shipwrecked seamen may look for shelter." 
Two thousand copies of this were dispersed, that every 
vessel which frequented this coast might be provided 
with one. I have read this Shipwrecked Seaman's Man- 
ual with a melancholy kind of interest, — for the sound 
of the surf, or, you might say, the moaning of the sea, is 
heard all through it, as if its author were the sole sur- 
vivor of a shipwreck himself. Of this part of the coast 
he says: "This highland approaches the ocean with 
steep and lofty banks, which it is extremely difficult to 
climb, especially in a storm. In violent tempests, during 
very high tides, the sea breaks against the foot of them, 
rendering it then unsafe to walk on the strand which lies 
between them and the ocean. Should the seaman suc- 
ceed in his attempt to ascend them, he must forbear to 
penetrate into the country, as houses are generally so 
remote that they would escape his research during the 
night; he must pass on to the valleys by which the 
banks are intersected. These valleys, which the inhab- 
3* 



53 CAPE COD. 

itants call Hollows, run at right angles with the shore, 
and in the middle or lowest part of them a road leads 
from the dwelling-houses to the sea." By the word 
road must not always be understood a visible cart- 
track. 

There were these two roads for us, — an upper and 
a lower one, — the bank and the beach ; both stretching 
twenty-eight miles northwest, from Nauset Harbor to 
Race Point, without a single opening into the beach, 
and with hardly a serious interruption of the desert. If 
you were to ford the narrow and shallow inlet at Nauset 
Harbor, where there is not more than eight feet of water 
on the bar at full sea, you might walk ten or twelve 
miles farther, which would make a beach forty miles 
long, — and the bank and beach, on the east side of 
Nantucket, are but a continuation of these. I was com- 
paratively satisfied. There I had got the Cape under 
me, as much as if I were riding it bare-backed. It was 
not as on the map, or seen from the stage-coach; but 
there I found it all out of doors, huge and real, Cape 
Cod ! as it cannot be represented on a map, color it as 
you will ; the thing itself, than which there is nothing 
more like it, no truer picture or account ; which you can- 
not go farther and see. I cannot remember what I 
thought before that it was. They commonly celebrate 
those beaches only which have a hotel on them, not 
those which have a humane house alone. But I wished 
to see that seashore where man's works are wrecks ; to 
put up at the true Atlantic House, where the ocean is 
land-lord as well as sea-lord, and comes ashore without a 
wharf for the landing ; where the crumbling land is the 
only invalid, or at best is but dry land, and that is all 
you can say of it. 



THE BEACH. 59 

We walked on quite at our leisure, now on the beach, 
now on the bank, — sitting from time to time on some 
damp log, maple or yellow birch, which had long fol- 
lowed the seas, but had now at last settled on land ; or 
under the lee of a sand-hill, on the bank, that we might 
gaze steadily on the ocean. Tlie bank was so steep, 
that, where there was no danger of its caving, we sat on 
its edge as on a bench. It was difficult for us landsmen 
to look out over the ocean without imagining land in the 
horizon ; yet the clouds appeared to hang low over it, 
and rest on the water as they never do on the land, per- 
haps on account of the great distance to which we saw. 
The sand was not without advantage, for, though it 
was " heavy " walking in it, it was soft to the feet ; and, 
notwithstanding that it had been raining nearly two days, 
when it held up for half an hour, the sides of the sand- 
hills, which were porous and sliding, afforded a dry seat. 
All the aspects of this desert are beautiful, whether you 
behold it in fair weather or foul, or when the sun is just 
breaking out after a storm, and shining on its moist sur- 
face in the distance, it is so white, and pure, and level, 
and each slight inequality and track is so distinctly 
revealed; and when your eyes slide off this, they fall 
on the ocean. In summer the mackerel gulls — which 
here have their nests among the neighborinor sand-hills 
— pursue the traveller anxiously, now and then diving 
close to his head with a squeak, and he may see them, 
like swallows, chase some crow which has been feeding 
on the beach, almost across the Cape. 

Though for some time I have not spoken of the roar- 
ing of the breakers, and the ceaseless flux and reflux of 
the waves, yet they did not for a moment cease to dash 
and roar, with such a tumult that, if you had been there, 



60 CAPE COD. 

you could scarcely have lieard my voice the while ; and 
they are dashing and roaring this very moment, though 
it may be with less din and violence, for there the sea 
never rests. We were wholly absorbed by this spec- 
tacle and tumult, and like Chryses, though in a different 
mood from him, we walked silent along the shore of the 
resounding sea. 

B^ S' aK€<ov irapa &lva 'nokv(^\oLcr^oi,o 6aXa.(raT]s.* 

I put in a little Greek now and then, partly because 
it sounds so much like the ocean, — though I doubt if 
Homer's Mediterranean Sea ever sounded so loud as 
this. 

The attention of those who frequent the camp-meet- 
ings at Eastham is said to be divided between the 
preaching of the Methodists and the preaching of the 
billows on the backside of the Cape, for they all stream 
over here in the course of their stay. I trust that in 
this case the loudest voice carries it. With what effect 
may we suppose the ocean to say, " My hearers ! " to the 
multitude on the bank! On that side some John N. 
Maffit; on this, the Reverend Poluphloisboios Tha- 
lassa. 

There was but little weed cast up here, and that kelp 
chiefly, there being scarcely a rock for rockweed to ad- 
here to. Who has not had a vision from some vessel's 
deck, when he had still his land-legs on, of this great 
brown apron, drifting half upright, and quite submerged 
through the green water, clasping a stone or a deep-sea 
mussel in its unearthly fingers ? I have seen it carry- 

* We have no word in English to express the sound of many -waves, 
dashing at once, whether gently or violently, 7roXv<^Aotor^oto? to the ear, 
and, in the ocean's gentle moods, an avapiQixov yiXturixa to the eye. 



THE BEACH. 61 

ing a stone half as large as mj head. We sometimes 
watched a mass of tliis cable-like weed, as it was tossed 
up on the crest of a breaker, waiting with interest to see 
it come in, as if there was some treasure buoyed up by 
it ;. but we were always surprised and disappointed at the 
insignificance of the mass which had attracted us. As 
we looked out over the water, the smallest objects iToat- 
ing on it appeared indefinitely large, we were so im- 
pressed by the vastness of the ocean, and each one bore 
so large a proportion to the whole ocean, which we saw. 
We were so often disappointed in the size of such things 
as came ashore, the ridiculous bits of wood or weed, with 
which the ocean labored, that we began to doubt whether 
the Atlantic itself would bear a still closer inspection, 
and would not turn out to be but a small pond, if it 
should come ashore to us. This kelp, oar-weed, tangle, 
devil's-apron, sole-leather, or ribbon-weed, — as various 
species are called, — appeared to us a singularly marine 
and fabulous product, a fit invention for Neptune to 
adorn his car with, or a freak of Proteus. All that 
is told of the sea has a fabulous sound to an inhabitant 
of the land, and all its products have a certain fabulous 
quality, as if they belonged to another planet, from 
sea-weed to a sailor's yarn, or a fish-story. In this ele- 
ment the animal and vegetable kingdoms meet and are 
strangely mingled. One species of kelp, according to 
Bory St. Vincent, has a stem fifteen hundred feet long, 
and hence is the longest vegetable known, and a brig's 
crew spent two days to no purpose collecting the trunks 
of another kind cast ashore on the Falkland Islands, 
mistaking it for drift-wood. (See Harvey on Algce.) 
This species looked almost edible ; at least, I thought that 
if I were starving I would try it. One sailor told me 



62 CAPE COD. 

that the cows ate it. It cut like cheese ; for I took the 

earliest opportunity to sit down and deliberately whittle 

up a fathom or two of it, that I might become more 

intimately acquainted with it, see how it cut, and if it 

were hollow all the way through. The blade looked 

like a broad belt, whose edges had been quilled, or as if 

stretched by hammering, and it was al?o twisted spirally. 

The extremity was generally worn and ragged from the 

lashing of the waves. A piece of the stem which I 

carried home shrunk to one quarter of its size a week 

afterward, and was completely covered with crystals of 

salt like frost. The reader will excuse my greenness, — 

though it is not sea-greenness, like his, perchance, — for 

I live by a river shore, where this weed does not wash 

up. When we consider in what meadows it grew, and 

how it was raked, and in what kind of hay weather 

got in or out, we may well be curious about it. One 

who is weather-wise has given the following account 

of the matter. 

" When descends on the Atlantic 
The gigantic 
Storm-wind of the equinox, 
Landward in his wrath he scourges 

The toiUng surges, 
Laden with sea-weed from the rocks. 

*' From Bermuda's reefs, from edges 
Of sunken ledges, 
On some far-off bright Azore; 
From Bahama and the dashing, 
Silver-flashing 
Surges of San Salvador; 

"From the trembling surf that buries 
The Orkneyan Skerries, 
Answering the hoarse Hebrides; 
And from wrecks and ships and drifting 
Spars, uplifting 
On the desolate rainy seas; 



THE BEACH. 63 

"Ever drifting, drifting, drifting 
On the shifting 
Currents of the restless main." 

But he was not thinking of this shore, when he add- 
ed:— 

" Till, in sheltered coves and reaches 
Of sandy beaches, 
All have found i-epose again." 

These weeds were the symbols of those grotesque and 
fabulous thoughts which have not yet got into the shel- 
tered coves of literature. 

" Ever drifting, drifting, drifting 
On the shifting 
Cun"ents of the restless heart," 
Aiid not yet " in books recorded 
They, like hoarded 
Household words, no more depart." 

The beach was also strewn with beautiful sea-jellies, 
which the wreckers called Sun-squall, one of the lowest 
forms of animal life, some white, some wine-colored, and 
a foot in diameter. I at first thought that they were 
a tender part of some marine monster, which the storm 
or some other foe had mangled. What right has the 
sea to bear in its bosom such tender things as sea-jellies 
and mosses, when it has such a boisterous shore, that 
the stoutest fabrics are wrecked against it? Strange 
that it should undertake to dandle such delicate children 
in its arm. I did not at first recognize these for the 
same which I had formerly seen in myriads in Boston 
Harbor, rising, with a waving motion, to the surface, 
as if to meet the sun, and discoloring the waters far and 
wide, so that I seemed to be sailing through a mere sun- 
fish soup. They say that when you endeavor to take 
one up, it will spill out the other side of your hand like 



64 CAPE COD. 

quicksilver. Before the land rose out of the ocean, and 
became dry land, chaos reigned ; and between high and 
low water mark, where she is partially disrobed and ris- 
ing, a sort of chaos reigns still, which only anomalous 
creatures can inhabit. Mackerel-gulls were all the while 
flying over our heads and amid the breakers, sometimes 
two white ones pursuing a black one ; quite at home in 
the storm, though they are as delicate organizations as 
sea-jellies and mosses ; and we saw that they were adapt- 
ed to their circumstances rather by their spirits than their 
bodies. Theirs must be an essentially wilder, that is, 
less human, nature than that of larks and robins. Their 
note was like the sound of some vibrating metal, and 
harmonized well with the scenery and the roar of the 
surf, as if one had rudely touched the strings of the 
lyre, which ever lies on the shore ; a ragged shred of 
ocean music tossed aloft on the spray. But if I were 
required to name a sound, the remembrance of which 
most perfectly revives the impression which the beach 
has made, it would be the dreary peep of the piping 
plover ( Charadrius melodus) which haunts there. Their 
voices, too, are heard as a fugacious part in the dirge 
which is ever played along the shore for those mariners 
who have been lost in the deep since first it was created. 
But through all this dreariness we seemed to have a 
pure and unqualified strain of eternal melody, for always 
the same strain which is a dirge to one household is a 
morning song of rejoicing to another. 

A remarkable method of catching gulls, derived from 
the Indians, was practised in Wellfleet in 1794. " The 
Gull House," it is said, " is built with crotchets, fixed in 
the ground on the beach," poles being stretched across 
for the top, and the sides made close with stakes and 



THE BEACH. 65 

sea-weed. " The poles on the top arc covered with lean 
whale. The man being placed within, is not discovered 
by the fowls, and while they are contending for and 
eating the flesh, he draws them in, one by one, between 
the poles, until he has collected forty or fifty." Hence, 
perchance, a man is said to be gulled, when he is tahen 
in. We read that one " sort of gulls is called by the 
Dutch mallemuche, i. e. the foolish fly, because they fall 
upon a whale as eagerly as a fly, and, indeed, all gulls 
are foolishly bold and easy to be shot. The Norwegians 
call this bird havhest, sea-horse (and the English trans- 
lator says, it is probably what we call boobies). If they 
have eaten too much, they throw it up, and eat it again 
till they are tired. It is this habit in the gulls of part- 
ing with their property [disgorging the contents of their 
stomachs to the skuas], which has given rise to the 
terms gull, guller, and gulling, among men." We also 
read that they used to kill small birds which roosted on 
the beach at night, by making a fire with hog's lard in 
a frying-pan. The Indians probably used pine torches ; 
the birds flocked to tlie light, and were knocked down 
with a stick. We noticed holes dug near the edge of 
the bank, where gunners conceal themselves to shoot 
the large gulls which coast up and down a-fishing, for 
these are considered good to eat. 

We found some large clams, of the species Mactra 
soUdissima, which the storm had torn up from the bot- 
tom, and cast ashore. I selected one of the largest, 
about six inches in length, and carried it along, thinking 
to try an experiment on it. We soon after met a 
wrecker, with a grapple and a rope, who said that he 
was looking for tow cloth, which had made part of the 
cargo of the ship Franklin, which was wrecked here in 



66 CAPE COD. 

the spring, at which time nine or ten lives were lost. 
The reader may remember this wreck, from the circum- 
stance that a letter was found in the captain's valise, 
which washed ashore, directing him to wreck the vessel 
before he got to America, and from the trial which took 
place in consequence. The wrecker said that tow cloth 
was still cast up in such storms as this. He also told 
us that the clam which I had was the sea-clam, or hen, 
and was good to eat. We took our nooning under a 
sand-hill, covered with beach-grass, in a dreary little 
hollow, on the top of the bank, while it alternately 
rained and shined. There, having reduced some damp 
drift-wood, which I had picked up on the shore, to shav- 
ings with my knife, I kindled a fire with a match and 
some paper, and cooked my clam on the embers for 
my dinner ; for breakfast was commonly the only meal 
which I took in a house on this excursion. When 
the clam was done, one valve held the meat and the 
other the liquor. Though it was very tough, I found 
it sweet and savory, and ate the whole with a relish. 
Indeed, with the addition of a cracker or two, it would 
have been a bountiful dinner. I noticed that the shells 
were such as I had seen in the sugar-kit at home. 
Tied to a stick, they formerly made the Indian's hoe 
hereabouts. 

At length, by mid-afternoon, after we had had two 
or three rainbows over the sea, the showers ceased, and 
the heavens gradually cleared up, though the wind still 
blowed as hard and the breakers ran as high as be- 
fore. Keeping on, we soon after came to a Charity- 
house, which we looked into to see how the shipwrecked 
mariner might fare. Far away in some desolate hollow 
by the sea-side, just within the bank, stands a lonely 



THE BEACH. 67 

building on piles driven into the sand, with a slight 
nail put through the staple, which a freezing man can 
bend, with some straw, perchance, on the floor on which 
ho may lie, or which he may burn in the fireplace 
to keep him alive. Perhaps this hut has never been 
required to shelter a shipwrecked man, and the benev-o- 
lent person who promised to inspect it annually, to see 
that the straw and mat(;hes are here, and that the boards 
will keep off the wind, has grown remiss and thinks 
that storms and shipwrecks are over; and this very 
night a perishing crew may pry open its door with their 
numbed lingers and leave half their number dead here 
by morning. When I thought what must be the con- 
dition of the families which alone would ever occupy 
or had occupied them, what must have been the tragedy 
of the winter evenings spent by human beings around 
their hearths, these houses, though they were meant for 
human dwellings, did not look cheerful to me. They 
appeared but a stage to the grave. The gulls flew 
around and screamed over them ; the roar of the ocean 
in storms, and the lapse of its waves in calms, alone 
resounds through them, all dark and empty within, year 
in year out, except, perchance, on one memorable night. 
Houses of entertainment for shipwrecked men ! What 
kind of sailor's homes were they ? 

" Each hut," says the author of the " Description of 
the Eastern Coast of the County of Barnstable," " stands 
on piles, is eight feet long, eight feet wide, and seven 
feet high ; a sliding door is on the south, a sliding 
shutter on the west, and a pole, rising fifteen feet above 
the top of the building, on the east. Within it is sup- 
plied either with straw or hay, and is further accommo- 
dated with a bench." They have varied little from this 



68 CAPE COD. 

model now. There are similar huts at the Isle of 
Sable and Anticosti, on the north, and how far south 
along the coast I know not. It is pathetic to read the 
minute and faithful directions which he gives to sea- 
men who may be wrecked on this coast, to guide them 
to the nearest Charity-house, or other shelter, for, as 
is said of Eastham, though there are a few houses with- 
in a mile of the shore, yet " in a snow-storm, which 
rages here with excessive fury, it would be almost 
impossible to discover them either by night or by day." 
You hear their imaginary guide thus marshalling, cheer- 
ing, directing the dripping, shivering, freezing troop 
along; "at the entrance of this valley the sand has 
gathered, so that at present a little climbing is neces- 
sary. Passing over several fences and taking heed 
not to enter the wood on the right hand, at the distance 
of three quarters of a mile a house is to be found. 
This house stands on the south side of the road, and 
not far from it on the south is Pamet river, which runs 
from east to west through a body of salt marsh." To 
him cast ashore in Eastham, he says, " The meeting- 
house is without a steeple, but it may be distinguished 
from the dwelHng-houses near it by its situation, which 
is between two small groves of locusts, one on the 
south and one on the north, — that on the south being 
three times as long as the other. About a mile and 
a quarter from the hut, west by north, appear the 
top and arms of a windmill." And so on for many 
pages. 

We did not learn whether these houses had been the 
means of saving any lives, though this writer says, of 
one erected at the head of Stout's Creek, in Truro, that 
" it was built in an improper manner, having a chimney 



THE BEACH. 69 

in it ; and was placed on a spot where no beach-grass 
grew. The strong winds blew the sand from its foun- 
dation, and the weight of the chimney brought it to the 
ground ; so that in January of the present year [1802] 
it was entirely demolished. This event took place about 
six weeks before the Brutus was cast away. If it had 
remained, it is probable that the whole of the unfortunate 
crew of that ship would have been saved, as they gained 
the shore a few rods only from the spot where the hut 
had stood." 

This " Charity-house," as the wrecker called it, this 
" Humane house," as some call it, that is, the one to 
which we first came, had neither window nor sliding 
shutter, nor clapboards, nor paint. As we have said, 
there was a rusty nail put through the staple. However, 
as we wished to get an idea of a Humane house, and we 
hoped that we should never have a better opportunity, 
we put our eyes, by turns, to a knot-hole in the door, 
and, after long looking, without seeing, into the dark, — 
not knowing how many shipwrecked men's bones we 
might see at last, looking with the eye of faith, knowing 
that, though to him that knocketh it may not always be 
opened, yet to him that looketh long enough through a 
knot-hole the inside shall be visible, — for we had had 
some practice at looking inward, — by steadily keeping 
our other ball covered from the light meanwhile, putting 
the outward world behind us, ocean and land, and the 
beach, — till the pupil became enlarged and collected the 
rays of light that were wandering in that dark (for the 
pupil shall be enlarged by looking ; there never was so 
dark a night but a faithful and patient eye, however 
small, might at last prevail over it), — after all this, I 
say, things began to take shape to our vision, — if we 



70 CAPE COD. 

may use this expression where there was nothing but 
emptiness, — and we obtained the long-wished-fbr in- 
sight. Though we thought at first that it was a hope- 
less case, after several minutes' steady exercise of the 
divine faculty, our pro.-pects began decidedly to brighten, 
and we were ready to exclaim with the bhnd bard of 
" Paradise Lost and Regained," — 

" Hail, holy Light! offspring of Heaven first born, 
Or of the Eternal co-eternal beam, 
May I express thee unblamed? " 

A little longer, and a chimney rushed red on our sight. 
In short, when our vision had grown familiar with the 
darkness, we discovered that there were some stones and 
some loose wads of wool on the floor, and an empty fire- 
place at the further end ; but it was not supplied with 
matches, or straw, or hay, that we could see, nor " ac- 
commodated with a bench." Indeed, it was the wreck 
of all cosmical beauty there within. 

Turning our backs on the outward world, we thus 
looked through the knot-hole into the Humane house, 
into the very bowels of mercy ; and for bread we found 
a stone. It was literally a great cry (of sea-mews out- 
side), and a little wool. However, we were glad to sit 
outside, under the lee of the Humane house, to escape 
the piercing wind ; and there w^e thought how cold is 
charity ! how inhumane humanity ! This, then, is what 
charity hides ! Virtues antique and far away with ever 
a rusty nail over the latch ; and very difficult to keep in 
repair, withal, it is so uncertain whether any will ever 
gain the beach near you. So we shivered round about, 
not being able to get into it, ever and anon looking 
through the knot-hole Into that night without a star, until 
we concluded that it was not a humane house at all, but 



THE BEACH. 71 

a sea-side box, now shut up, belonging to some of the 
family of Night or Chaos, where tliey spent their sum- 
mers by the sea, for the sake of the sea-breeze, and that 
it was not proper for us to be piying into their concerns. 
My companion had declared before this that I had not 
a particle of sentiment, in rather absolute terms, to my 
astonishment ; but I suspect he meant that my legs did 
not ache just then, though I am not wholly a stranger to 
that sentiment. But I did not intend this for a senti- 
mental journey. 



'ZRSl 



x' oi-' x'T-ii^y 



THE WELLFLEET OYSTERMAN. 



Having walked about eight miles since we struck the 
beach, and passed the boundary between Wellfleet and 
Truro, a stone post in the sand, — for even this sand 
comes under the jurisdiction of one town or another, — 
we turned inland over barren hills and valleys, whither 
the sea, for some reason, did not follow us, and, tracing 
up a Hollow, discovered two or three sober-looking 
houses within half a mile, uncommonly near the eastern 
coast. Their garrets were apparently so full of cham- 
bers, that their roofs could hardly lie down straight, and 
we did not doubt that there was room for us there. 
Houses near the sea are generally low and broad. 
These were a story and a half high ; but if you merely 
counted the windows in their gable-ends, you would 
think that there were many stories more, or, at any rate, 
that the half-story was the only one thought worthy of 
being illustrated. The great number of windows in the 
ends of the houses, and their irregularity in size and 
position, here and elsewhere on the Cape, struck us 
agreeably, — as if each of the various occupants who 
had their cunahula behind had punched a hole where 
his necessities requked it, and, according to his size and 
stature, without regard to outside effect. There were 



. THE WELLFLEET OYSTEBMAN. 73 

windows for the grown folks, and windows for the chil- 
dren, — three or four apiece; as a certain man had a 
large hole cut in his barn-door for the cat, and another 
smaller one for the kitten. Sometimes they were so low 
under the eaves that I thought they must have perfo- 
rated the plate beam for another apartment, and I noticed 
some which were triangular, to lit that part more exactly. 
The ends of the houses had thus as many muzzles as a 
revolver, and, if the inhabitants have the same habit of 
staring out the windows that some of our neighbors have, 
a traveller must stand a small chance with them. 

Generally, the old-fashioned and unpainted houses on 
the Cape looked more comfortable, as well as pictu- 
resque, than the modern and more pretending ones, which 
were less in harmony with the scenery, and less firmly 
planted. 

These houses were on the shores of a chain of ponds, 
seven in number, the source of a small stream called 
Herring River, which empties into the Bay. There are 
many Herring Rivers on .the Cape ; they will, perhaps, 
be more numerous than herrings soon. We knocked at 
the door of the first house, but its inhabitants were all 
gone away. In the mean while, we saw the o^icupants 
of the next one looking out the window at us, and 
before we reached it an old woman came out and fas- 
tened the door of her bulkhead, and went in again. 
Nevertheless, we did not hesitate to knock at her door, 
when a grizzly-looking man appeared, whom we took to 
be sixty or seventy years old. He asked us, at first, 
suspiciously, where we were from, and what our business 
was ; to which we returned plain answers. 

" How far is Concord from Boston ? " he inquired. 

" Twenty miles by railroad." 
4 



74 CAPE COD. 

" Twenty miles by railroad," he repeated. 

" Did n't you ever hear of Concord of Kevolutionary 
fame?" 

" Did n't I ever hear of Concord ? Wliy, I heard the 
guns fire at the battle of Bunker Hill. [They hear the 
sound of heavy cannon across the Bay.] I am almost 
ninety; I am eighty-eight year old. I was fourteen 
year old at the time of Concord Fight, — and where were 
you then ? " 

We were obliged to confess that we were not in the 
fight. 

" Well, walk in, we '11 leave it to the women," said he. 

So we walked in, surprised, and sat down, an old 
woman taking our hats and bundles, and the old man 
continued, drawing up to the large, old-fashioned fii'e- 
place, — 

" I am a poor good-for-nothing crittur, as Isaiah says ; 
I am all broken down this year. I am under petticoat 
government here." 

The family consisted of the old man, his wife, and his 
daughter, who appeared nearly as old as her mother, 
a fool, her son (a brutish-looking, middle-aged man, with 
a prominent lower face, who was standing by the hearth 
■when we entered, but immediately went out), and a little 
boy of ten. 

While my companion talked with the women, I talked 
with the old man. They said that he was old and fool- 
ish, but he was evidently too knowing for them. 

"These women," said he to me, "are both of them 
poor good-for-nothing critturs. This one is my wife. I 
married her sixty-four years ago. She is eighty-four 
years old, and as deaf as an adder, and the other is not 
much better.'* 



THF WELLFLEET OYSTERMAN. 75 

He thought well of the Bible, or at least he spohe 
well, and did not thinh ill, of it, for that would not have 
been prudent for a man of his age. He said that he 
had read it attentively for many years, and he had much 
of it at his tongue's end. He seemed deeply impressed 
with a sense of his own nothingness, and would repeat- 
edly exclaim, — 

" I am a nothing. "Wliat I gather from my Bible is 
just this: that man is a poor good-for-nothing crittur, 
and everything is just as God sees fit and disposes.'* 

" May I ask your*name ? " I said. 

" Yes," he answered, " I am not ashamed to tell my 

name. My name is . My great-grandfather came 

over from England and settled here." 

He was an old Wellfleet oysterman, who had acquired 
a competency in that business, and had sons still engaged 
in it. 

Nearly all the oyster shops and stands in Massachu- 
setts, I am told, are supplied and kept by natives of 
"Wellfleet, and a part of this town is still called Billings- 
gate from the oysters having been formerly planted there ; 
but the native oysters are said to have died in 1770. 
Various causes are assigned for this, such as a ground 
frost, the carcasses of black-fish, kept to rot in the har- 
bor, and the like, but the most common account of the 
matter is, — and I find that a similar superstition with 
regard to the disappearance of fishes exists almost every- 
where, — that when Wellfleet began to quarrel with the 
neighboring towns about the right to gather them, yel- 
low specks appeared in them, and Providence caused 
them to disappear. A few years ago sixty thousand 
bushels were annually brought from the South and 
planted in the harbor of Wellfleet till they attained " the 



-« 



76 CAPE COD. 

proper relish of Billingsgate " ; but now they are im- 
ported commonly full-grown, and laid down near their 
markets, at Boston and elsewhere, where the water, 
being a mixture of salt and fresh, suits them better. 
The business was said to be still good and improving. 

The old man said that the oysters were liable to freeze 
in the winter, if planted too high ; but if it were not "so 
cold as to strain their eyes" they were not injured. 
The inhabitants of New Brunswick have noticed that 
" ice will not form over an oyster-bed, unless the cold is 
very intense indeed, and when the bays are frozen over 
the oyster-beds are easily discovered by the water above 
them remaining unfrozen, or as the French residents 
say, degek." Our host said that they kept them in cel- 
lars all winter. 

" Without anything to eat or drink ? " I asked. 

" Without anything to eat or drink," he answered. 

" Can the oysters move ? " 

" Just as much as my shoe." 

But when I caught him saying that they " bedded 
themselves down in the sand, flat side up, round side 
down," I told him that my shoe could not do that, with- 
out the aid of my foot in it ; at which he said that they 
merely settled down as they grew ; if put down in a 
square they would be found so ; but the clam could 
move quite fast. I have since been told by oystermen 
of Long Island, where the oyster is still indigenous and 
abundant, that they are found in large masses attached 
to the parent in their midst, and are so taken up with 
their tongs ; in which case, they say, the age of the 
young proves that there could have been no motion for 
five or six years at least. And Buckland in his Curiosi- 
ties of Natural History (page 50) says : " An oyster 



THE WELLFLEET OYSTERMAN. 77 

who has once taken up his position and fixed himself 
■when quite young, can never make a change. Oysters, 
nevertheless, that have not fixed themselves, but remain 
loose at the bottom of the sea, have the power of loco- 
motion ; they open their shells to their fullest extent, 
and then suddenly contracting them, the expulsion of 
the water forwards gives a motion backwards. A fish- 
erman at Guernsey told me that he had frequently seen 
oysters moving in this way." 

Some still entertain the question " whether the oys- 
ter was indigenous in Massachusetts Bay," and whether 
Wellfleet harbor was a " natural habitat " of this fish ; 
but, to say nothing of the testimony of old oystermen, 
■which, I think, is quite conclusive, though the na- 
tive oyster may now be extinct there, I saw that their 
shells, opened by the Indians, were strewn all over the 
Cape. Indeed, the Cape was at first thickly settled by 
Indians on account of the abundance of these and other 
fish. We saw many traces of their occupancy after this, 
in Truro, near Great Hollow, and at High-Head, near 
East Harbor River, — oysters, clams, cockles, and other 
shells, mingled with ashes and the bones of deer and 
other quadrupeds. I picked up half a dozen aiTOw-heads, 
and in an hour or two could have filled my pockets 
with them. The Indians lived about the edges of the 
swamps, then probably in some instances ponds, for 
shelter and water. Moreover, Champlain in the edition 
of his "Voyages" printed in 1G13, says that in the 
year 1G06 he and Poitrincourt explored a harbor (Barn- 
stable Harbor ?) in the southerly part of what is now called 
Massachusetts Bay, in latitude 42°, about five leagues 
south, one point west of Cap Blanc (Cape Cod), and 
there they found many good oysters, and they named it 



78 CAPE COD. 

^^le Port aitx Jluistres" (Oyster Harbor). In one edi- 
tion of his map (1632), the "i?. aux Escailles*' is drawn 
emptying into the same part of the bay, and on the 
map ^^ Novi Belgii" in Ogilby's America (1670), the 
words " Port aux Huistres " are placed against the 
same place. Also William Wood, who lefl New Eng- 
land in 1633, speaks, in his "New England's Pros- 
pect," pubhshed in 1634, of "a great oyster-bank" 
in Charles River, and of another in the Mistick, each 
of which obstructed the navigation of its river. " The 
oysters," says he, "be great ones in form of a shoe- 
horn ; some be a foot long ; these breed on certain 
banks that are bare every spring tide. This tish without 
the shell is so big, that it must admit of a division before 
you can well get it into your mouth." Ojsters are still 
found there. (Also, see Thomas Morton's New English 
Canaan, page 90.) 

Our host told us that the sea-clam, or hen, was not 
easily obtained ; it was raked up, but never on the At- 
lantie side, only cast ashore there in small quantities in 
storms. The fi^herman sometimes wades in water sev- 
eral feet deep, and thrusts a pointed stick into the sand 
before him. When this enters between the valves of 
a clam, he closes them on it, and is drawn out. It has 
been known to catch and hold coot and teal which were 
preying on it. I chanced to be on the bank of the 
Acushnet at New Bedford one day since this, watching 
some ducks, when a man informed me that, having let out 
his young ducks to seek their food amid the samphire (Sa- 
licornia) and other weeds along the river-side at low tide 
that morning, at length he noticed that one remained sta- 
tionary, amid the weeds, something preventing it from 
following the others, and going to it he found its foot 



THE WELLFLEET OYSTERMAN. 79 

tightly shut in a quahog's shell. He took up both 
together, carried them to his home, and his wife opening 
the shell with a knife released the duck and cooked the 
quahog. The old man said that the great clams were 
good to eat, but that they always took out a certain part 
which was poisonous, before they cooked them. " Peo- 
ple said it would kill a cat." I did not tell him that I 
had eaten a large one entire that afternoon, but began 
to think that I was tougher than a cat. He stated that 
pedlers came round there, and sometimes tried to sell the 
women folks a skimmer, but he told them that their wo- 
men had got a better skimmer than they could make, in the 
shell of their clams ; it was shaped just right for this 
purpose. — They call them " skim-alls " in some places. 
He also said that the sun-squawl was poisonous to handle, 
and when the sailors came across it, they did not meddle 
with it, but heaved it out of their way. I told him that 
I had handled it that afternoon, and had felt no ill effects 
as yet. But he said it made the hands itch, especially 
if they had previously been scratched, or if I put it into 
my bosom, I should find out what it was. 

He informed us that no ice ever formed on the back 
side of the Cape, or not more than once in a century, 
and but little snow lay there, it being either absorbed or 
blown or washed away. Sometimes in winter, when the 
tide was down, the beach was frozen, and afforded a 
hard road up the back side for some thirty miles, as 
smooth as a floor. One winter when he was a boy, he 
and his father " took right out into the back side before 
daylight, and walked to Provincetown and back to 
dinner." 

When I asked what they did with all that barren-look- 
ing land, where I saw so few cultivated fields, — " Noth- 
ing," he said. 



80 CAPE COD. 

" Then why fence your fields ? " 

" To keep the sand from blowing and covering up the 
whole." 

" The yellow sand," said he, " has some life in it, but 
the white little or none." 

When, in answer to his questions, I told him that I was 
a surveyor, he said that they who surveyed his farm 
were accustomed, where the ground was uneven, to loop 
up each chain as high as their elbows ; that was the 
allowance they made, and he wished to know if I 
could tell him why they did not come out according to 
his deed, or twice alike. He seemed to have more 
respect for surveyors of the old school, which I did not 
wonder at. " King George the Third," said he, " laid 
out a road four rods wide and straight the whole length 
of the Cape," but where it was now he could not tell. 

This story of the surveyors reminded me of a Long- 
Islander, who once, when I had made ready to jump 
from the bow of his boat to the shore, and he thought 
that I underrated the distance and would fall short, — • 
though I found afterward that he judged of the elasticity 
of my joints by his own, — told me that when he came 
to a brook which he wanted to get over, he held up one 
leg, and then, if his foot appeared to cover any part 
of the opposite bank, he knew that he could jump it. 
" Why," I told him, " to say nothing of the Mississippi, 
and other small watery streams, I could blot out a star 
with my foot, but I would not engage to jump that dis- 
tance," and asked how he knew when he had got his leg 
at the ridit elevation. But he reorarded his lej^s as no 
less accurate than a pair of screw dividers or an ordi- 
nary quadrant, and appeared to have a painful recollec- 
tion of every degree and minute in the arc which they 



THE WELLFLEET OYSTERMAN. 81 

described ; and he would have had me believe that there 
was a kind of hitch in his hip-joint which answered the 
purpose. I suggested that he should connect his two 
ankles by a string of the proper length, which should be 
the chord of an arc, measuring his jumping ability on 
horizontal surfaces, — assuming one leg to be a perpen- 
dicular to the plane of the horizon, which, however, may 
have been too bold an assumption in this case. Never- 
theless, this was a kind of geometry in the legs which it 
interested me to hear of. 

Our host took pleasure in telling us the names of the 
ponds, most of which we could see from his windows, 
and making us repeat them after him, to see if we 
had got them right. They were Gull Pond, the largest 
and a very handsome one, clear and deep, and more 
than a mile in circumference, Newcomb's, Swett's, 
Slough, Horse-Leech, Round, and Herring Ponds, all 
connected at high water, if I do not mistake. The 
coast-surveyors had come to him for their names, and he 
told them of one which they had not detected. He said 
that they were not so high as formerly. There was an 
earthquake about four years before he was born, which 
cracked the pans of the ponds, which were of iron, and 
caused them to settle. I did not remember to have read 
of this. Innumerable gulls used to resort to them ; but 
the large gulls were now very scarce, for, as he said, the 
Enghsh robbed their nests far in the north, where they 
breed. He remembered well when gulls were taken in 
the gull-house, and when small birds were killed by 
means of a frying-pan and fire at night. His father 
once lost a valuable horse from this cause. A party 
from Wellfleet having lighted their fire for this purpose, 
one dark night, on Billingsgate Island, twenty horses 

4* y 



82 CAPE COD. 

which were pastured there, and this colt among them, 
being frightened by it, and endeavoring in the dark to 
cross the passage which separated them from the neigh- 
boring beach, and which was then fordable at low tide, 
were all swept out to sea and drowned. I observed that 
many hordes were still turned out to pasture all summer 
on the islands and beaches in "Welltleet, Eastham, and 
Orleans, as a kind of common. He also described the 
killing of what he called " wild hens " here, after they 
had gone to roost in the woods, when he was a boy. 
Perhaps they were "Prairie hens" (pinnated grouse). 

He liked the Beach-pea {Lathyrus maritimus), cooked 
green, as well as the cultivated. He had seen it grow- 
ing very abundantly in Newfoundland, where also the 
inhabitants ate them, but he had never been able to ob- 
tain any ripe for seed. We read, under the head of 
Chatham, that "in 1555, during a time of great scarcity, 
the people about Orford, in Sussex (Enghmd) were pre- 
served . from perishing by eating the seeds of this plant, 
which grew there in gi-eat abundance on the sea-coast. 
Cows, horses, sheep, and goats eat it." But the writer 
who quoted this could not learn that they had ever been 
used in Barnstable County. 

He had been a voyager, then? O, he had been 
about the world in his day. He once considered him- 
self a pilot for all our coast ; but now they had changed 
the names so he might be bothered. 

He gave us to taste what he called the Summer Sweet- 
ing, a pleasant apple which he raised, and frequently 
grafted from, but had never seen growling elsewhere, ex- 
cept once, — three trees on Newfoundland, or at the Bay 
of Chaleur, I forget which, as he w^as sailing by. He 
was sure that he could tell the tree at a distance. 



THE WELLFLEET OYSTERMAN. 83 

At length the fool, whom my companion called the 
wizard, came in, muttering between his teeth, " Damn 
book-pedlers, — all the time talking about books. Bet- 
ter do something. Damn 'em. I '11 shoot 'era. Got a 
doctor down here. Damn him, I '11 get a gun and shoot 
him " ; never once holding up his head. Whereat the 
old man stood up and said in a loud voice, as if he 
was accustomed to command, and this was not the first 
time he had been obliged to exert his authority there : 
" John, go sit down, mind your business, — we 've heard 
you talk before, — precious little you '11 do, — your bark 
is worse than your bite." But, w'ithout minding, John 
muttered the same gibberish over again, and then sat 
down at the table which the old folks had left. He ate 
all there was on it, and then turned to the apples, which 
his aged mother was paring, that she might give her 
guests some apple-sauce for breakfast, but she drew 
them away and sent him off. 

When I approached this house the next summer, over 
the desolate hills between it and the shore, which are 
worthy to have been the birthplace of Ossian, I saw 
the wizard in the midst of a cornfield on the hillside, 
but, as usual, he loomed so strangely, that I mistook him 
for a scarecrow. 

This was the merriest old man that we had ever seen, 
and one of the best preserved. His style of conversa- 
tion was coarse and plain enough to have suited Rabe- 
lais. He would have made a good Panurge. Or 
rather he was a sober Silenus, and we were the boys 
Chromis and Mnasilus, who listened to his story. 

" Not by Hsemonian hills the Thracian bard, 
Nor awful Phoebus was on Pindus heard 
With deeper silence or with more regard." 



84 CAPE COD. 

There was a strange mingling of past and present in 
his conversation, for he had lived under King George, and 
might have remembered when Napoleon and the mod- 
erns generally were born. He said that one day, when 
the troubles between the Colonies and the mother country 
first broke out, as he, a boy of fifteen, was pitching hay 
out of a cart, one Doane, an old Tory, who was talking 
with his father, a good Whig, said to him, " Why, Uncle 
Bill, you might as well undertake to pitch that pond into 
the ocean with a pitchfork, as for the Colonies to under- 
take to gain their indtependence." He remembered well 
General Wasliington, and how he rode his horse along 
the streets of Boston, and he stood up to show us how he 
looked. 

" He was a r — a — ther large and portly-looking man, 
a manly and resolute-looking officer, with a pretty good 
leg as he sat on his horse." — " There, I'll tell you, tliis 
was the way with Wasliington." Then he jumped up 
again, and bowed gracefully to right and left, making 
show as if he were waving his hat. Said he, " That 
was Washington." 

He told us many anecdotes of the Revolution, and 
was much pleased whei\ we told him that we had read 
the same in history, and that his account agreed with the 
written. 

" 0," he said, " I know, I know ! I was a young 
fellow of sixteen, with my ears wide open ; and a fel- 
low of that age, you know, is pretty wide awake, and 
likes to know everything that 's going on. O, I 
know ! " 

He told us the story of the wreck of the Franklin, 
which took place there the previous spring : how a boy 
came to his house early in the morning to know whose 



THE WELLFLEET OYSTERMAN. 85 

boat that was by the shore, for there was a vessel in dis- 
tress, and he, being an old man, first ate his breakfast, 
and then walked over to the top of the hill by the shore, 
and sat down there, having found a comfortable seat, to 
see the ship wrecked. She was on the bar, only a quar- 
ter of a mile from him, and still nearer to the men on 
the beach, who had got a boat ready, but could render 
no assistance on account of the breakers, for there was 
a pretty high sea i-unning. There were the passengers 
all crowded together in tlie forward part of the ship, and 
some were getting out of the cabin wmdows and were 
drawn on deck by the others. 

" I saw the captain get out his boat," said he ; " he 
had one little one ; and then they jumped into it one after 
another, down as straight as an arrow. I counted them. 
There were nine. One was a woman, and she jumped 
as straight as any of them. Then they slioved off. The 
sea took them back, one wave went over them, and when 
they came up there were six still chnging to the. boat ; I 
counted them. The next wave turned the boat bottom 
upward, and emptied them all out. None of them ever 
came ashore alive. There were the rest of them all 
crowded together on the forecastle, the other parts of the 
ship being under water. They had seen all that hap- 
pened to tlie boat. At length a hea\^ sea separated the 
forecastle from the rest of the wreck, and set it inside of 
the worst breaker, and the boat was able to reach tliem, 
and it saved all that were left, but one woman." 

He also told us of the steamer Cambria's getting 
agroimd on his shore a few months before we were there, 
and of her Enghsh passengers who roamed over his 
grounds, and who, he said, thought the prospect from the 
high hill by the shore " the most delightsome they had 



86 CAPE COD. 

ever seen," and also of the pranks which the ladies 
played with his scoop-net in the ponds. He spoke of 
these travellers with their purses full of guineas, just as 
our provincial fathers used to speak of British bloods in 
the time of King George the Third. 

Quid loquar ? Why repeat what he told us ? 

•' Aut Scyllam NUi, quam fama secuta est, 
Candida succinchim lati-aatibus mgiiina raonstiis, 
Dulichias vexasse rates, et gtirgite iii eJto 
Ah timidos iiautas canibus lacerasse marhiis ? " 

In the course of the evening I began to feel the po- 
tency of the clam wliich I had eaten, and I was obliged 
to confess to our host that I was no tougher than the cat 
he told of; but he answered, that he was a plain-spoken 
man, and he could tell me that it was all imagination. At 
any rate, it proved an emetic in my case, and I was made 
quite sick by it for a short time, while he laughed at my 
expense. I was pleased to read afterward, in Mourt's 
Relation of the lajiding of Uie Pilgrims in Provincetown 
Harbor, these words : " We found gi'eat muscles (the 
old editor says tliat they were undoubtedly sea-clams) 
and very fat and full of sea-pearl ; but we could not eat 
them, for they made us all sick that did eat, as well 

sailors as passengers, but they were soon well 

again." It brought me nearer to the Pilgrims to be 
thus reminded by a similar experience that I was so 
like them. Moreover, it was a valuable confij-mation 
of their story, and I am prepared now to believe every 
word of Mourt's Relation. I was also pleased to find 
that man and the clam lay still at the same angle to one 
another. But I did not notice sea-pearl. Like Cleo- 
patra, I must have swallowed it. I have smce dug 
these clams on a flat in the Bay and observed them. 



THE WELLFLEET OYSTEKMAN. 87 

They could squirt full ten feet before the wind, as 
appeared by the marks of the drops on the sand. 

" Now I am going to ask you a question," said the old 
man, " and I don't know as you can tell me ; but you are 
a learned man, and I never had any learning, only what 
I got by natur." — It was in vain that we reminded him 
that he could quote Josephus to our confusion. — "I've 
thought, if I ever met a learned man I should hke to 
ask him this question. Can you tell me how Axy is 
spelt, and what it means ? Axy" says he ; " there 's 
a girl over here is named Axy. Now what is it ? What 
does it mean ? Is it Scripture ? I 've read my Bible 
twenty-five years over and over, and I never came 
across it." 

" Did you read it twenty-five years for this object ? " 
I asked. 

" Well, how is it spelt ? Wife, how is it spelt ? " 

She said : " It is in the Bible ; I 've seen it." 

" Well, how do you spell it ? " 

" I don't know. A c h, ach, s e h, seh, — Achseh." 

" Does that spell Axy ? Well, do you know what it 
means ? " asked he, turning to me. 

" No," I replied, " I never heard the sound before." 

" There was a schoolmaster down here once, and they 
asked him what it meant, and he said it had no more 
meaning than a bean-pole." 

I told him that I held the same opinion with the 
schoolmaster. I had been a schoolmaster myself, and 
had had strange names to deal with. I also heard 
of such names as Zoheth, Beriah, Amaziah, Bethuel, 
and Shearjashub, hereabouts. 

At length the little boy, who had a seat quite in the 
chimney-corner, took off his stockings and shoes, warmed 



88 CAPE COD. 

his feet, and having had his sore leg freshly salved, went 
off to bed ; then the fool made bare his knotty -looking 
feet and legs, and followed him ; and finally the old man 
exposed his calves also to our gaze. We had never had 
the good fortune to see an old man's legs before, and 
were surprised to find them fair and plump as an in- 
fant's, and we thought that he took a pride in exhib- 
iting them. He then proceeded to make preparations 
for retiring, discoursing meanwhile with Panurgic plain- 
ness of speech on the ills to which old humanity is 
subject. We were a rare haul for him. He could com- 
monly get none but ministers to talk to, though some- 
times ten of them at once, and he was glad to meet some 
of the laity at leisure. The evening was not long enough 
for him. As I had been sick, the old lady asked if 
I would not go to bed, — it was getting late for old peo- 
ple ; but the old man, who had not yet done his stories, 
said, " You ain't particular, are you ? " 

" no," said I, " I am in no hurry. I believe I have 
weathered the Clam cape." 

" They are good," *said he ; "I Avish I had some of 
them now." 

"They never hurt me," said the old lady. 

"But then you took out the part that killed a cat," 
said I. 

At last we cut him short in the midst of his stories, 
which he promised to resume in the morning. Yet, 
after all, one of the old ladies who came into our room 
in the night to fasten the fire-board, which rattled, as she 
went out took the precaution to fasten us in. Old 
women are by nature more suspicious than old men. 
However, the winds howled around the house, and 
made the fire-boards as well as the casements rattle 



THE WELLFLEET OYSTER MAN. 89 

well that night. It was probably a windy night for any 
locality, but we could not distinguish the roar which was 
proper to the ocean from that which was due to the 
wind alone. 

The sounds which the ocean makes must be very sig- 
nificant and interesting to those who live near it. When 
I was leaving the shore at this place the next summer, 
and had got a quarter of a mile distant, ascending a hill, 
I was startled by a sudden, loud sound from the sea, as 
if a large steamer were letting off steam by tlie shore, 
so that I caught my breath and felt my blood run cold 
for an instant, and I turned about, expecting to see one 
of the Atlantic steamers thus far out of her course, but 
there was nothing unusual to be seen. There was a low 
bank at the entrance of the Hollow, between me and the 
ocean, and suspecting that I might have risen into 
another stratum of air in ascending the hill, — which had 
wafted to me only the ordinary roar of the sea, — I im- 
mediately descended again, to see if I lost hearing of it ; 
but, without regard to my ascending or descending, it 
died away in a minute or two, and yet there was scarcely 
any wind all the while. The old man said that this was 
what they called the " rut," a peculiar roar of the sea 
before the wind changes, which, however, he could not 
account for. He thought that he could tell all about the 
weather from the sounds which the sea made. 

Old Josselyn, who came to New England in 1.638, has 
it among his weather-signs, that " the resounding of the 
sea from the shore, and murmuring of the winds in the 
woods, without apparent wind, sheweth wind to follow." 

Being on another part of the coast one night since 
this, I heard the roar of the surf a mile distant, and the 
inhabitants said it was a sign that the wind would work 



90 CAPE COD. 

round east, and we should have rainj weather. The 
ocean was heaped up somewhere at the eastward, and 
this roar was occasioned by its effort to preserve its 
equilibrium, the wave reaching the shore before the 
wind. Also the captain of a packet between this country 
and England told me that he sometimes met with a wave 
on the Atlantic coming against the wind, perhaps in a 
calm sea, which indicated that at a distance the wind 
was blowing from an opposite quarter, but the undula- 
tion had travelled faster than it. Sailors tell of '' tide- 
rips " and " ground-swells," which they suppose to have 
been occasioned by hurricanes and earthquakes, and to 
have travelled many hundred, and sometimes even two 
or three thousand miles. 

Before sunrise the next morning they let us out 
again, and I ran over to the beach to see the sun come 
out of the ocean. The old woman of eighty-four win- 
ters was already out in the cold morning wind, bare- 
headed, tripping about like a young girl, and driving up 
the cow to milk. She got the breakfast with despatch, 
and without noise or bustle ; and meanwhile the old man 
resumed his stories, standing before us, Avho were sitting, 
with his back to the chimney, and ejecting his tobacco- 
juice right and left into the fire behind him, without 
regard to the various dishes which were there preparing. 
At breakfast we had eels, buttermilk cake, cold bread, 
green beans, doughnuts, and tea. The old man talked a 
steady stream ; and when his wife told him he had bet- 
ter eat his breakflist, he said : " Don't hurry me ; I have 
lived too long to be hurried." I ate of the apple-sauce 
and the doughnuts, which I thought had sustained the 
least detriment from the old man's shots, but my com- 
panion refused the apple-sauce, and ate of the hot cake 



THE WELLFLEET OYSTERMAN. 91 

and green beans, which liad appeared to him to occupy 
the safest part of the hearth. But on comparing notes 
afterward, I told him that the buttermilk cake was par- 
ticularly exposed, and I saw how it suffered repeatedly, 
and therefore I avoided it ; but he declared that, how- 
ever that might be, he witnessed that the apple-sauce 
was seriously injured, and had therefore declined that. 
After breakfast we looked at his clock, which was out 
of order, and oiled it with some " hen's grease," for want 
of sweet oil, for he scarcely could believe that we were 
not tinkers or pedlers ; meanwhile he told a story about 
visions, which had reference to a crack in the clock-case 
made by frost one night. He was curious to know to 
what relio-ious sect we belon^^ed. He said that he had 
been to hear thirteen kinds of preaching in one month, 
when he was young, but he did not join any of them, — 
he stuck to his Bible. There was nothing like any of 
them in his Bible. While I was shaving in the next 
room, I heard him ask my companion to what sect he 
belonged, to which he answered : 

" 0, I belong to the Universal Brotherhood." 
« What 's that ? " he asked, « Sons o' Temperance ? " 
Finally, filling our pockets with doughnuts, which he 
was pleased to find that we called by the same name 
that he did, and paying for our entertainment, we took 
our departure ; but he followed us out of doors, and 
made us tell him the names of the vegetables which he 
had raised from seeds that ca^e out of the Franklin. 
They were cabbage, broccoli, and parsley. As I had 
a:>ked him the names of so many things, he tried me in 
turn with all the plants which grew in his garden, both 
wild and cultivated. It was about half an acre, which 
he cultivated wholly himself. Besides the common gar- 



92 CAPE COD. 

den vegetables, there were Yellow-Dock, Lemon Balm, 
Hyssop, Gill-go-over-the-groiind, Mouse-ear, Chick-weed, 
Roman Wormwood, Elecampane, and other plants. As 
we stood there, I saw a fish-hawk stoop to pick a fi;h out 
of his pond. 

" There," Siiid I, " he has got a fish." 

" Well," Siiid the old man, who was looking all the 
while, but could see nothing, " he did n't dive, he just 
wet his claws." 

And, sure enough, he did not this time, though it is 
said that thej often do, but he merely stooped low enough 
to pick him out with his talons ; but as he bore his shin- 
ing prey over the bushes;, it fell to the ground, and we 
did not see that he recovered it. That is not their prac- 
tice. 

Thus, having had another crack with the old man, he 
standing bareheaded under the eaves, he directed us 
" athwart the fields," and we took to the beach again for 
another day, it being now late in the morning. 

It was but a day or two after this that the safe of the 
Provincetown Bank was broken open and robbed by two 
men from the interior, and we learned that our hospi- 
table entertainers did at least transiently harbor the sus- 
picion tliat we were the men. 



VI. 
THE BEACH AGAIN. 



Our way to the high sand-bank, which I have de- 
scribed as extending all along the coast, led, as usual, 
through patches of Bayberry bushes, which straggled 
into the sand. This, next to the Shrub-oak, was perhaps 
the most common shrub thereabouts. I was much 
attracted by its odoriferous leaves and small gray berries 
which are clustered about the short twigs, just below the 
last year's growth. I know of but two bushes in Concord, 
and they, being staminate plants, do not bear fruit. The 
berries gave it a venerable appearance, and they smelled 
quite spicy, like small confectionery. Robert Beverley, 
in his " History of Virginia," published in 1705, states that 
" at the mouth of their rivers, and all along upon the 
sea and bay, and near many of their creeks and swamps, 
grows the myrtle, bearing a berry, of which they make 
a hard brittle wax, of a curious green color, which by 
refining becomes almost transparent. Of this they make 
candles, which are never greasy to the touch nor melt 
with lying in the hottest weather ; neither does the snuff 
of these ever offend the smell, like that of a tallow can- 
dle ; but, instead of being disagreeable, if an accident 
puts a candle out, it yields a pleasant fragrancy to all 
that are in the room ; insomuch that nice people often 



94 CAPE COD. 

put them out on purpose to have the incense of the ex- 
piring snuff. The melting of these berries is said to 
have been first found out by a surgeon in New England, 
who performed wonderful things with a salve made of 
them." From the abundance of berries still hanging on 
the bushes, we judged that the inhabitants did not gener- 
ally collect them for tallow, though w^e had seen a piece 
in the house we had just left. I have since made some 
tallow myself. Holding a basket beneath the bare twigs 
in April, I rubbed them together between my hands and 
thus gathered about a quart in twenty minutes, to which 
were added enough to make three pints, and I might 
have gathered them much faster with a suitable rake and 
a large shallow basket. They have little prominences 
like those of an orange all creased in tallow, which also 
fills the interstices down to the stone. The oily part 
rose to the top, making it look like a savory black broth, 
which smelled much like balm or other herb tea. You 
let it cool, then skim off the tallow from the surface, 
melt this again and strain it. I got about a quarter of 
a pound weight from my three pints, and more yet re- 
mained within the berries. A small portion cooled in 
the form of small flattish hemispheres, like crystalliza- 
tions, the size of a kernel of corn (nuggets I called them 
as I picked them out from amid the berries). Loudon 
says, that " cultivated trees are said to yield more wax 
than those that are found wild." (See Duplessy, Vege- 
taux Resineux, Vol. 11. p. 60.) If you get any pitch 
on your hands in the pine-woods you have only to rub 
some of these berries between your hands to start it off. 
But the ocean was the grand fact there, which made 
us forget both bayberries and men. 

To-day the air was beautifully clear, and the sea no 



THE BEACH AGAIN. 95 

longer dark and stormy, though the waves still broke 
with foam along the beach, but sparkling and full of life. 
Already that morning I had seen the day break over 
the sea as if it came out of its bosom : — 

" The saffron-robed Dawn rose in haste from the streams 
Of Ocean, that she might bring light to immortals and to mortals." 

The sun rose visibly at such a distance over the sea, 
that the cloud-bank in the horizon, which at first con- 
cealed him, was not perceptible until he had risen high 
behind it, and plainly broke and dispersed it, like an 
arrow. But as yet I looked at him as rising over land, 
and could not, without an effort, realize that he was ris- 
ing over the sea. Already I saw some vessels on the 
horizon, which had rounded the Cape in the night, and 
were now well on their watery way to other lands. 

We struck the beach again in the south part of Truro. 
In the early part of the day, while it was flood tide, and 
the beach was narrow and soft, we walked on the bank, 
which was very high here, but not so level as the day 
before, being more interrupted by slight hollows. The 
author of the Description of the Eastern Coast says of 
this part, that " the bank is very high and steep. From 
the edge of it west, there is a strip of sand a hundred 
yards in breadth. Then succeeds low brushwood, a 
quarter of a mile wide, and almost impassable. After 
which comes a thick perplexing forest, in which not a 
house is to be discovered. Seamen, therefore, though 
the distance between these two hollows (Newcomb's and 
Brush Hollows) is great, must not attempt to enter the 
wood, as in a snow-storm they must undoubtedly perish." 
This is still a true description of the country, except that 
there is not much high wood left. 



96 CAPE COD. 

There were many vessels, like gulls, skimming over 
the surface of the sea, now half concealed in its troughs, 
their dolphin-strikers ploughing the water, now tossed oa 
the top of the billows. One, a barque standing down par- 
allel with the coast, suddenly furled her sails, came to 
anchor, and swung round in the wind, near us, only half 
a mile from the shore. At first we thought that her 
captain wished to communicate with us, and perhaps we 
did not regard the signal of distress, which a mariner 
would have understood, and he cursed us for cold-hearted 
wreckers who turned our backs on him. For hours we 
could still see her anchored there behind us, and we 
wondered how she could afford to loiter so long in her 
course. Or was she a smuggler who had chosen that 
wild beach to land her cargo on ? Or did they wish to 
catch fish, or paint their vessel ? Erelong other barks, 
and brigs, and schooners, which had in the mean while 
doubled the Cape, sailed by her in the smacking breeze, 
and our consciences were relieved. Some of these ves- 
sels lagged behind, while others steadily went ahead. 
We narrowly watched their rig and the cut of their jibs, 
and how they walked the water, for there was all the 
difference between them that there is between living 
creatures. But we wondered that they should be re- 
membering Boston and New York and Liverpool, steer- 
ing for them, out there ; as if the sailor might forget his 
peddling business on such a grand highway. They had 
perchance brought oranges from the Western Isles ; and 
were they carrying back the peel ? We might as well 
transport our old traps across the ocean of eternity. Is 
that but another " trading flood," with its blessed isles ? 
Is Heaven such a harbor as the Liverpool docks ? 

Still held on without a break, the inland barrens and 



THE BEACH AGAIN. 97 

shrubbery, the desert and the high sand-bank with its 
even slope, the broad white beach, the breakers, the 
green water on the bar, and the Atlantic Ocean ; and we 
traversed with delight new reaches of the shore ; we 
took another lesson in sea-horses' manes and sea-cows* 
tails, in sea-jellies and sea-clams, with our new-gained 
experience. The sea ran hardly less than the day be- 
fore. It seemed with every wave to be subsiding, 
because such was our expectation, and yet when hours 
had elapsed we could see no difference. But there it 
was, balancing itself, the restless ocean by our side, lurch- 
ing in its gait. Each wave left the sand all braided or 
woven, as it were, with a coarse woof and warp, and a dis- 
tinct raised edge to its rapid work. We made no haste, 
since we wished to see the ocean at our leisure, and indeed 
that soft sand was no place in which to be in a hurry, for 
one mile there was as good as two elsewhere. Besides, 
we were obliged frequently to empty our shoes of the sand 
which one took in in climbing or descending the bank. 

As we were walking close to the water's edge this 
morning, we turned round, by chance, and saw a large 
black object which the waves had just cast up on the 
beach behind us, yet too far off for us to distinguish 
what it was ; and when we were about to return to it, 
two men came running from the bank, where no human 
beings bad appeared before, as if they had come out of 
the sand, in order to save it before another wave took 
it. As we approached, it took successively the form 
of a huge fish, a drowned man, a sail or a net, and 
finally of a mass of tow-cloth, part of the cargo of the 
Franklin, which the men loaded into a cart. 

Objects on the beach, whether men or inanimate 
things, look not only exceedingly grotesque, but much 



98 CAPE COD. 

larger and more wonderful than they actually are. 
Lately, when approaching the sea-shore several degree3 
south of this, I saw before me, seemingly half a mile 
distant, what appeared hke bold and rugged cliffs on the 
beach, fifteen feet high, and whitened by the sun and 
waves ; but after a few steps it proved to be low heaps of 
rags, — part of the cargo of a wrecked vessel, — scarcely 
more than a foot in height. Once also it was my busi- 
ness to go in search of the relics of a human body, man- 
gled by sharks, which had just been cast up, a week 
after a wreck, having got the direction from a light- 
house : I should find it a mile or two distant over the 
sand, a dozen rods from the water, covered with a cloth, 
by a stick stuck up. I expected that I must look very 
naiTOwly to find so small an object, but the sandy beach, 
half a mile wide, and stretching farther than the eye 
could reach, was so perfectly smooth and bare, and the 
mirage toward the sea so magnifying, that when I was 
half a mile distant the insignificant sliver which marked 
the spot looked like a bleached spar, and the relics were 
as conspicuous as if they lay in state on that sandy plain, 
or a generation had labored to pile up their cairn there. 
Close at hand they were simply some bones with a little l 
flesh adhering to them, in fact, only a slight inequality 
in the sweep of the shore. There was nothing at all 
remarkable about them, and they were singularly inof- 
fensive both to the senses and the imagination. But as 
I stood there they grew more and more imposing. They 
were alone with the beach and the sea, whose hollow 
roar seemed addressed to them, and I was impressed as 
if there was an understanding between them and the 
ocean which necessarily left me out, with my snivelling 
sympathies. That dead body had taken possession of 



THE BEACH AGAIN. 99 

the shore, and reigned over it as no living one could, in 
the name of a certain majesty which belonged to it. 

We afterward saw many small pieces of tow-cloth 
washed up, and I learn that it continued to be found in 
good condition, even as late as November in that year, 
half a dozen bolts at a time. 

We eagerly filled our pockets with the smooth round 
pebbles which in some places, even tere, were thinly 
sprinkled over the sand, together with flat circular 
shells (Scutellce ?) ; but, as we had read, when they were 
dry they had lost their beauty, and at each sitting we 
emptied our pockets again of the least remarkable, until 
our collection was well culled. Every material was 
rolled into the pebble form by the waves ; not only stones 
of various kinds, but the hard coal which some vessel 
had dropped, bits of glass, and in one instance a mass of 
peat three feet long, where there was nothing like it to 
be seen for many miles. All the great rivers of the 
globe are annually, if not constantly, discharging great 
quantities of lumber, which drifts to distant shores. I 
have also seen very perfect pebbles of brick, and bars 
of Castile soap from a wreck rolled into perfect cylin- 
ders, and still spirally streaked with red, like a barber's 
pole. When a cargo of rags is washed ashore, every 
old pocket and bag-like recess will be filled to bursting 
with sand by being rolled on the beach; and on one 
occasion, the pockets in the clothing of the wrecked 
being thus puffed up, even after they had been ripped 
open by wreckers, deluded me into the hope of identi- 
fying them by the contents. A pair of gloves looked 
exactly as if filled by a hand. The water in such cloth- 
ing is soon wrung out and evaporated, but the sand, 
which works itself into every seam, is not so easily got 



100 CAPE COD. 

rid of. Sponges, wliicli are picked up on the shore, as is 
well known, retain some of the sand of the beach to the 
latest day, in spite of every effort to extract it. 

I found one stone on the top of the bank, of a dark 
gray color, shaped exactly like a giant clam' {Mactra 
solidissima), and of the same size; and, what was more 
remarkable, one half of the outside had shelled off and 
lay near it, of the same form and depth with one of the 
valves of this clam, while the other half was loose, leav- 
ing a solid core of a darker color within it. I afterward 
saw a stone resembling a razor clam, but it was a solid 
one. It appeared as if the stone, in the process of for- 
mation, had filled the mould which a clam-shell furnished ; 
or the same law that shaped the clam had made a clam 
of stone. Dead clams, with shells full of sand, are 
called sand clams. There were many of the large clam- 
shells filled with sand ; and sometimes one valve was 
separately filled exactly even, as if it had been heaped 
and then scraped. Even among the many small stones 
on the top of the bank, I found one arrow-head. 

Beside the giant clam and barnacles, we found on the 
shore a small clam (3Iesodesma arctata), which I dug 
with my hands in numbers on the bars, and which is 
sometimes eaten by the inhabitants, in the absence of the 
Mya arenaria, on this side. Most of their empty shells 
had been perforated by some foe. — Also, the 

Astarte castanea. 

The Edible Mussel {^Mytilus edulis) on the few rocks, 
and washed up in curious bunches of forty or fifty, held 
together by its rope-like hyssus. 

The Scollop Shell (Pecten concentricus), used for 
card-racks and pin-cushions. 

Cockles, or Cuckoos (Natica heros)^ and their re- 



THE BEACH AGAIN. 101 

markable nidus, called " sand-circle," looking like the top 
of a stone jug without the stopple, and broken on one 
side, or like a flaring dickey made of sand-paper. Also, 

Cancellaria Couthouyi (?), and 

Periwinkles (?) (Fusus decemcostatus). 

We afterward saw some other kinds on the Bay side. 
Gould states that this Cape " has hitherto proved a bar- 
rier to the migrations of many species of Mollusca." — 
" Of the one hundred and ninety-seven species [which 
he described in 1840 as belonging to Massachusetts], 
eighty-three do not pass to the South shore, and fifty are 
not found on the North shore of the Cape." 

Among Crustacea, there were the shells of Crabs and 
Lobsters, often bleached quite white high up the beach; 
Sea or Beach Fleas {Amphipoda) ; and the cases of the 
Horse-shoe Crab, or Saucepan Fish (Limuhis PoJyphce- 
miis), of which we saw many alive on the Bay side, 
where they feed pigs on them. Their tails were used 
as arrow-heads by the Indians. 

Of Radiata, there were the Sea Chestnut or Egg (JSchi- 
nus granidatus), commonly divested of its spines; flat 
circular shells (Scutella parma ?) covered with choco- 
late-colored spines, but becoming smooth and white, with 
five petal-like figures ; a few Star-fishes or Five-fingers 
(Astenas rubens) ; and Sun-fishes or Se^-jellies {Aure- 
Ucb). 

There was also at least one species of Sponge. 

The plants which I noticed here and there on the 
pure sandy shelf, between the ordinary high-water mark 
and the foot of the bank, were Sea Rocket ( Calcile Ameri- 
cana), Saltwort (Salsola kali), Sea Sandwort {Honhenya 
peploides), Sea Burdock (Xanthium echinatiun), Sea-side 
Spurge {Euphorhia pohjgonifoUa) ; also, Beach Grass 



102 CAPE COD. 

(Arundo, Psamma, or Calamagrostis arenarid), Sea-side 
Golden-rod {Solidago sempervirens), and the Beach Pea 
(^Lathyrus maritimus) . 

Sometimes we helped a wrecker turn over a larger 
log than usual, or we amused ourselves with rolling 
stones down the bank, but we rarely could make one 
reach the water, the beach was so soft and wide ; or we 
bathed in some shallow within a bar, where the sea 
covered us with sand at every flux, though it was quite 
cold and windy. The ocean there is commonly but a 
tantalizing prospect in hot weather, for with all that 
water before you, there is, as we were afterward told, 
no bathing on the Atlantic side, on account of the under- 
tow and the rumor of sharks. At the light-house both 
in Easthara and Truro, the only houses quite on the 
shore, they declared, the next year, that they would not 
bathe there " for any sum," for they sometimes saw the 
sharks tossed up and quiver for a moment on the sand. 
Others laughed at these stories, but perhaps-they could 
afford to because they never bathed anywhere. One old 
wrecker told us that he kiJied a regular man-eating shark 
fourteen feet long, and hauled him out with his oxen, 
where we had bathed ; and another, that his father 
caught a smaller one of the same kind that was stranded 
there, by standing him up on his snout so that the waves 
could not take him. They will tell you tough stories 
of sharks all over the Cape, which I do not presume to 
doubt utterly, — how they will sometimes upset a boat, 
or tear it in pieces, to get at the man in it. I can easily 
believe in the undertow, but I have no doubt that one 
shark in a dozen years is enough to keep up the reputa- 
tion of a beach a hundred miles long. I should add, 
however, that in July we walked on the bank here a 



THE BEACH AGAIN. 103 

quarter of a mile parallel with a fish about six feet in 
length, possibly a shark, which was prowling slowly 
along within two rods of the shore. It was of a pale 
brown color, singularly film-like and indistinct in the 
water, as if all nature abetted this child of ocean, and 
showed many darker transverse bars or rings whenever 
it came to the surface. It is well known that different 
fishes even of the same species are colored by the water 
they inhabit. We saw it go into a little cove or bathing- 
tub, where we had just been bathing, where the water 
was only four or five feet deep at that time, and after 
exploring it go slowly out again ; but we continued to 
bathe there, only observing first from the bank if the 
cove was preoccupied. We thought that the water was 
fuller of life, more aerated perhaps than that of the 
Ba}^, like soda-water, for we were as particular as 
young salmon, and the expectation of encountering 
a shark did not subtract anything from its life-giving 
quahties. 

Sometimes we sat on the wet beach and watched the 
beach birds, sand-pipers, and others, trotting along close 
to each wave, and waiting for the sea to cast up their 
breakfast. The former (Charadrnis melodus) ran with 
great rapidity and then stood stock still remarkably erect 
and hardly to be distinguished from the beach. The 
wet sand was covered with small skipping Sea Fleas, 
which apparently make a part of their food. These 
last are the little scavengers of the beach, and are so 
numerous that they will devour large fishes, which have 
been cast up, in a very short time. One little bird not 
larger than a sparrow, — it may have been a Phala- 
rope, — would alight on the turbulent surface where the 
breakers were five or six feet high, and float buoyantly 



104 CAPE COD. 

there like a duck, cunningly taking to its wings and 
lifting itself a few feet through the air over the foaming 
crest of each breaker, but sometimes outriding safely a 
considerable billow which hid it some seconds, when its 
mstinct told it that it would not break. It was a little 
creature thus to sport with the ocean, but it was as per- 
fect a success in its way as the breakers in theirs. There 
was also an almost uninterrupted line of coots rising and 
falling with the waves, a few rods from the shore, the 
whole length of the Cape. They made as constant a part 
of the ocean's border as the pads or pickerel-weed do of 
that of a pond. We read the following as to the Storm 
Petrel {Tkalassidroma Wilsonii), which is seen in the Bay 
as well as on the outside. " The feathers on the breast 
of the Storm Petrel are, like those of all swimming bird.^, 
water-proof; but substances not susceptible of being wet- 
ted with water are, for that very reason, the best fitted 
for collecting oil from its surface. That function is per- 
formed by the feathers on the breast of the Storm Petrels 
as they touch on the surface ; and though that may not 
be the only way in which they procure their food, it is 
certainly that in which they obtain great part of it. They 
dash along till they have loaded their feathers and then 
they pause upon the wave and remove the oil with their 
bills." 

Thus we kept on along the gently curving shore, see- 
ing two or three miles ahead at once, — along this ocean 
side-walk, where there was none to turn out for, with the 
middle of the road the highway of nations on our ri^ht, 
and the sand cliffs of the Cape on our left. We saw this 
forenoon a part of the wreck of a vessel, probably the 
Franklin, a large piece fifteen feet square, and still freshly 
painted. With a grapple and a line we could have saved 



THE BEACH AGAIN. 105 

it, for the waves repeatedly washed it within cast, but 
they as often took it back. It would have been a lucky 
haul for some poor wrecker, for I have been told that 
one man who paid three or four dollars for a part of the 
wreck of that vessel, sold fifty or sixty dollars' worth of 
iron out of it. Another, the same who picked up the 
Captain's valise with the memorable letter in it, showed 
me, growing in his garden, many pear and plum trees 
which washed ashore from her, all nicely tied up and 
labelled, and he said that he might have got five hun- 
dred dollars worth ; for a Mr. Bell was importing the 
nucleus of a nursery to be established near Boston. His 
turnip-seed came from the same source. Also valuable 
spars from the same vessel and from the Cactus lay in 
his yard. In short the inhabitants visit the beach to see 
what they have caught as regularly as a fisherman his 
weir or a lumberer his boom ; the Cape is their boom. 
I heard of one who had recently picked up twenty bar- 
rels of apples in good condition, probably a part of a 
deck load thrown over in a storm. 

Though there are wreck-masters appointed to look 
after valuable property which must be advertised, yet 
undoubtedly a great deal of value is secretly carried ofi*. 
But are we not all wreckers contriving that some treasure 
may be washed up on our beach, that we may secure 
it, and do we not infer the habits of these Nauset and 
Barnegat wreckers, from the common modes of getting a 
living ? 

The sea, vast and wild as it is, bears thus the waste 
and wrecks of human art to its remotest shore. There 
is no telling what it may not vomit up. It lets nothing 
lie ; not even the giant clams which cling to its bottom. 
It is still heaving up the tow-cloth of the Frankhn, and 
6* 



106 CAPE COD. 

perhaps a piece of some old pirate's ship, wrecked 
more than a hundred years ago, comes ashore to-day. 
Some years since, when a vessel was wrecked here 
which had nutmegs in her cargo, they were strewn all 
along the beach, and for a considerable time were not 
spoiled by the salt water. Soon afterward, a fisherman 
caught a cod which was full of them. Wliy, then, might 
not the Spice-Islanders shake their nutmeg-trees into 
the ocean, and let all nations who stand in need of them 
pick them up ? However, after a year, I found that the 
nutmegs from the Franklin had become soft. 

You might make a curious list of articles which fishes 
have swallowed, — sailors' open clasp-knives, and bright 
tin snuflT-boxes, not knowing what was in them, — Tnd 
jugs, and jewels, and Jonah. The other day I came 
across the following scrap in a newspaper. 

"A Religious Fish. — A short time ago, mine host 
Stewart, of the Denton Hotel, purchased a rock-fish, weigh- 
mg about sixty pounds. On opening it he found in it a cer- 
tificate of membership of the M. E. Church, which we read 
as follows : — 

Member 
Methodist E. Church. 
Founded A. D. 1784. 
Quarterly Ticket. 13 

Minister. 
' For our light affliction, wliicli is but for a moment, worketh for 
us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.' — 2 Cor. iv. 17. 
' what are all my sufferings here, 
If, Lord, thou count me meet 
With that enraptured host t' appear, 
And worship at thy feet.' 

^' The paper was of course in a crumpled and wet condition 
but on exposing it to the sun, and ironing the kinks out of 
It. It became quite legible. — Denton (Md.J Journal." 



THE BEACH AGAIN. 107 

From time to time we saved a wreck ourselves, a box 
or barrel, and set it on its end, and appropriated it with 
crossed sticks ; and it will lie there perhaps, respected 
by brother wreckers, until some more violent storm shall 
take it, really lost to man until wrecked again. We aLo 
saved, at the cost of wet feet only, a valuable cord and 
buoy, part of a seine, with which the sea was playing, 
for it seemed ungracious to refuse the least gift which so 
great a personage offered you. We brought this home 
and still use it for a garden line. I picked up a bottle 
half buried in the wet sand, covered with barnacles, but 
stoppled tight, and half full of red ale, which still smacked 
of juniper, — all that remained I fancied from the wreck 
of a rowdy world, — that great salt sea on the one hand, 
and this little sea of ale on the other, preserving their 
separate characters. What if it could tell us its adven- 
tures over countless ocean waves ! Man would not be 
man through such ordeals as it had passed. But as I 
poured it slowly out on to the sand, it seemed to me that 
man himself was like a half-emptied bottle of pale ale, 
which Time had drunk so far, yet stoppled tight for a 
while, and drifting about in the ocean of circumstances ; 
but destined erelong to mingle with the surrounding 
waves, or be spilled amid the sands of a distant shore. 

In the summer I saw two men fishing for Bass here- 
abouts. Their bait was a bullfrog, or several small 
frogs in a bunch, for want of squid. They followed a 
retiring wave and whirling their lines round and round 
their heads with increasing rapidity, threw them as far 
as they could into the sea ; then retreating, sat down, flat 
on the sand, and waited for a bite. It was literally (or 
littorally) walking down to the shore, and throwing your 
line into the Atlantic. I should not have known what 



108 CAPE COD. 

might take hold of the other end, whether Proteus or 
another. At any rate, if you could not pull him in, ^hy, 
you might let him go without being pulled in yourself. 
And they knew by experience that it would be a Striped 
Bass, or perhaps a Cod, for these fishes play along near 
the shore. 

From time to time we sat under the lee of a sand-hill 
on the bank, thinly covered with coarse beach-grass, and 
steadily gazed on the sea, or watched the vessels going 
south, all Blessings of the Bay of course. We could 
see a little more than half a circle of ocean, besides the 
glimpses of the Bay which we got behind us ; the sea 
there was not wild and dreary in all respects, for there 
were frequently a hundred sail in sight at once on the 
Atlantic. You can commonly count about eighty in a 
favorable summer day, and pilots sometimes land and 
ascend the bank to look out for those which require their 
services. These had been waiting for fair weather, and 
had come out of Boston Harbor together. The same is 
the case when they have been assembled in the Vineyard 
Sound, so that you may see but few one day, and a large 
fleet the next. Schooners with many jibs and stay-sails 
crowded all the sea road ; square-rigged vessels with 
their great height and breadth of canvas were ever and 
anon appearing out of the far horizon, or disappearing 
and sinking into it ; here and there a pilot-boat was tow- 
ing its little boat astern toward some distant foreigner 
who had just fired a gun, the echo of which along the 
shore sounded like the caving of the bank. We could 
see the pilot looking through his glass toward the distant 
ship wdiich was putting back to speak with him. He 
sails many a mile to meet her ; and now she puts her 
sails aback, and communicates with him alongside, — 



THE BEACH AGAIN. . 109 

■ 

sends some important message to tlie owners, and then 
bids farewell to these shores for good and all ; or, per- 
chance a propeller passed and made fast to some disabled 
craft, or one that had been becalmed, whose cargo of 
fruit might spoil. Though silently, and for the most part 
incoramunicativelj, going about their business, they were, 
no doubt, a source of cheerfulness and a kind of society 
to one another. 

To-day it was the Purple Sea, an epithet which I 
should not before have accepted. There were distinct 
patches of the color of a purple grape with the bloom 
rubbed off. But first and last the sea is of all colors. 
Well writes Gilpin concerning '^ the brilliant hues which 
are continually playing on the surface of a quiet ocean," 
and this was not too turbulent at a distance from the 
shore. " Beautiful," says he, "no doubt in a high degree 
are those glimmering tints which often invest the tops of 
mountains ; but they are mere coruscations compared 
with these marine colors, which are continually varying 
and shifting into each other in all the vivid splendor of 
the rainbow, through the space often of several leagues." 
Commonly, in calm weather, for half a mile from the 
shore, where the bottom tinges it, the sea is green, or 
greenish, as are €ome ponds ; then blue for many miles, 
often wuth purple tinges, bounded in the distance by a 
light almost silvery stripe ; beyond which there is gener- 
ally a dark-blue rim, like a mountain ridge in the hori- 
zon, as if, like that, it owed its color to the intervening 
atmosphere. On another day it wnll be marked with 
long streaks, alternately smooth and rippled, light-colored 
and dark, even like our inland meadows in a freshet, 
and showing which way the wind sets. 

Thus we sat on the foaming shore, looking on the 
wine-colored ocean. — 



110 CAPE COD. 

Qiv ecf) aXbs ttoXitjs, opooav cttI otvona ttovtov. 
Here and there was a darker spot on its surface, the 
shadow of a cloud, though the sky was so clear that 
no cloud would have been noticed otherwise, and no 
shadow would have been seen on the land, where a 
much smaller surface is visible at once. So, distant 
clouds and showers may be seen on all sides by a sailor 
in the course of a day, which do not necessarily portend 
rain where he is. In July we saw similar dark-blue 
patches where schools of IMenhaden rippled the surface, 
scarcely to be distinguished from the shadows of clouds. 
Sometimes the sea was spotted with them far and wide, 
such is its inexhaustible fertility. Close at hand you see 
their back fin, which is very long and sharp, projecting 
two or three inches above water. From time to time 
also we saw the white bellies of the Bass playing along 
the shore. 

It was a poetic recreation to watch those distant sails 
steering for half fabulous ports, whose very names are a 
mysterious music to our ears : Fayal, and Babel-mandel, 
ay, and Chagres, and Panama, — bound to the famous 
Bay of San Francisco, and the golden streams of Sacra- 
mento and San Joaquin, to Feather River and the 
American Fork, where Sutter's Fort presides, and inland 
stands the City de los Angeles. It is remarkable that 
men do not sail the sea with more expectation. Nothing 
remarkable was ever accomplished in a prosaic mood. 
The heroes and discoverers have found true more than 
was previously believed, only when they were expecting 
and dreaming of something more than their contempo- 
raries dreamed of, or even themselves discovered, that 
is, when they were in a frame of mind fitted to behold 
the truth. Referred to the world's standard, they are 



THE BEACH AGAIN. Ill 

always insane. Even savages have indirectly surmised 
as much. Humboldt, speaking of Columbus approach- 
ing the New World, says : " The grateful coolness of 
the evening air, the ethereal purity of the starry firma- 
ment, the balmy fragrance of flowers, wafted to him by 
the land breeze, all led him to suppose (as we are told 
by Herrera, in the Decades) that he was approaching 
the garden of Eden, the sacred abode of our first parents. 
The Orinoco seemed to him one of the four rivers which, 
according to the venerable tradition of the ancient world, 
flowed from Paradise, to water and divide the surface of 
the earth, newly adorned with plants." So even the 
expeditions for the discovery of El Dorado, and of the 
Fountain of Youth, led to real, if not compensatory dis- 
coveries. 

We discerned vessels so far off, when once we began 
to look, that only the tops of their masts in the horizon 
were visible, and it took a strong intention of the eye, 
and its most favorable side, to see them at all, and some- 
times we doubted if we were not counting our eyelashes. 
Charles Darwin states that he saw, from the base of the 
Andes, " the masts of the vessels at anchor in the bay of 
Valparaiso, although not less than twenty-six geograph- 
ical miles distant," and that Anson had been surprised 
at the distance at which his vessels were discovered from 
the coast, without knowing the reason, namely, the great 
height of the land and the transparency of the air. 
Steamers may be detected much farther than sailing 
vessels, for, as one says, when their hulls and masts of 
wood and iron are down, their smoky masts and stream- 
ers still betray them ; and the same writer, speaking of 
the comparative advantages of bituminous and anthracite 
coal for war-steamers, states that, " from the ascent of 



112 CAPE COD. 

the columns of smoke above the horizon, the motions 
of the steamers in Cahiis Harbor [on the coast of 
France] are at all times observable at Ram?gate [on 
the English coast], from the first lighting of the fires to 
the putting out at sea; and that in America the steamers 
burning the fat bituminous coal can be tracked at sea at 
least seventy miles before the hulls become visible, by 
the dense columns of black smoke pouring out of their 
chimneys, and trailing along the horizon." 

Though there were numerous vessels at this great dis- 
tance in the horizon on every side, yet the vast spaces 
between them, like the spaces between the stars, far as 
they were distant from us, so were they from one an- 
other — na}% s&me were twice as far from each other as 
from us, — impressed us with a sense of the immensity of 
the ocean, the " unfruitful ocean," as it has been called, 
and we could see what proportion man and his works 
bear to the globe. As we looked off, and saw the water 
growing darker and darker and deeper and deeper the 
farther we looked, till it was awful to consider, and it 
appeared to have no relation to the friendly land, either 
as shore or bottom, — of what use is a bottom if it is out 
of sight, if it is two or three miles from the surface, and 
you are to be drowned so long before you get to it, 
though it were made of the same stuff with your native 
soil ? — over that ocean, where, as the Veda says, " there 
is nothing to give support, nothing to rest upon, nothing 
to cling to," I felt that I was a land animal. The man 
in a balloon even may commonly alight on the earth in 
a few moments, but the sailor's only hope is that he may 
reach the distant shore. I could then appreciate the 
heroism of the old navigator. Sir Humphrey Gilbert, of 
whom it is related, that being overtaken by a storm 



THE BEACH AGAIN. 113 

when on his return from America, in the year 1583, far 
northeastward from where we were, sitting abaft with a 
book in his hand, just before he was swallowed up in the 
deep, he cried out to his comrades in the Hind, as they 
came within hearing, "We are as near to Heaven by 
sea as by land." I saw that it would not be easy to 
realize. 

On Cape Cod, the next most eastern land you hear of 
is St. George's Bank (the fishermen tell of " Georges," 
" Cashus," and other sunken lands which they frequent). 
Every Cape man has a theory about George's Bank 
having been an island once, and in their accounts they 
gradually reduce the shallowness from six, five, four, 
two fathoms, to somebody's confident assertion that he 
has seen a mackerel-gull sitting on a piece of dry land 
there. It reminded me, when I thought of the ship- 
wrecks which had taken place there, of the Isle of 
Demons, laid down oflf this coast in old charts of the 
New World. There must be something monstrous, me- 
thinks, in a vision of the sea bottom from over some 
bank a thousand miles from the shore, more awful than 
its imagined bottomlessness ; a drowned continent, all 
livid and frothing at the nostrils, like the body of a 
drowned man, which is better sunk deep than near the 
surface. 

I have been surprised to discover from a steamer the 
shallowness of Massachusetts Bay itself. Off Billings- 
gate Point I could have touched the bottom with a pole, 
and I plainly saw it variously shaded with sea-weed, at 
five or six miles from the shore. This is " The Shoal- 
ground of the Cape," it is true, but elsewhere the Bay is 
not much deeper than a country pond. We are told 
that the deepest water in the English Channel between 



114 CAPE COD. 

Shakespeare's Cliff and Cape Grin^z, in France, is ono 
hundred and eighty feet ; and Guyot says that " the Bal- 
tic Sea has a depth of only one hundred and twenty feet 
between the coasts of Germany and those of Sweden," 
and " the Adriatic between Venice and Trieste has a 
depth of only one hundred and thirty feet." A pond in 
my native town, only half a mile long, is more than one 
hundred feet deep. 

The ocean is but a larger lake. At midsummer you 
may sometimes see a strip of glassy smoothness on it, a 
few rods in width and many miles long, as if the surface 
there were covered with a thin pellicle of oil, just as on 
a country pond ; a sort of stand-still, you would say, at 
the meeting or parting of two currents of air (if it does 
not rather mark the unrippled steadiness of a current 
of water beneath), for sailors tell of the ocean and land 
breeze meeting between the fore and aft sails of a vessel, 
while the latter are full, the former being suddenly taken 
aback. Daniel Webster, in one of his letters describing 
blue-fishing off Martha's Vineyard, referring to those 
smooth places, which fishermen and sailors call " slicks," 
says : " We met with them yesterday, and our boatman 
made for them, whenever discovered. He said they 
were caused by tlie blue-fish chopping up their prey. 
That is to say, those voracious fellows get into a school 
of menhaden, which are too large to swallow whole, and 
they bite them into pieces to suit their tastes. And 
the oil from this butchery, rising to the surface, makes 
the ' sHck.' " 

Yet this same placid Ocean, as civil now as a city's 
harbor, a place for ships and commerce, will erelong 
be lashed into sudden fury, and all its caves and cliffs 
will resound with tumult. It will ruthlessly heave 



THE BEACH AGAIN. 115 

these vessels to and fro, break them in pieces in its 
gandj or stony jaws, and deliver their crews to sea- 
monsters. It will play with them like sea-weed, distend 
them like dead frogs, and' carry them about, now high, 
now low, to show to the fishes, giving them a nibble. 
This gentle Ocean will toss and tear the rag of a man's 
body like the father of mad bulls, and his relatives may 
be seen seeking the remnants for weeks along the strand. 
From some quiet inland hamlet they have rushed weep- 
ing to the unheard-of shore, and now stand uncertain 
where a sailor has recently been buried amid the sand- 
hills. 

It is generally supposed that they who have long been 
conversant with the Ocean can foretell, by certain indi- 
cations, such as its roar and the notes of sea-fowl, 
when it will change from calm to storm ; but probably 
no such ancient mariner as we dream of exists; they 
knov/ no more, at least, than the older sailors do about 
this voyage of life on which we are all embarked. Nev- 
ertheless, we love to hear the sayings of old sailors, and 
their accounts of natural phenomena, which totally ignore, 
and are ignored by, science ; and possibly they have not 
always looked over the gunwale so long in vain. Kalm 
repeats a story which was told him in Philadelphia by a 
Mr. Cock, who was one day saihng to the '\\^est Indies 
in a small yacht, with an old man on board who w'as well 
acquainted with those seas. " The old man sounding the 
depth, called to'^Jie mate to tell Mr. Cock to launch the 
boats immediately, and to put a sufficient number of men 
into them, in order to tow the yacht during the calm, 
that they might reach the island before them as soon' as 
possible, as within twenty -four hours there would be a 
strong hurricane. Mr. Cock asked him what reasons he 



116 CAPE COD. 

had to think so ; the old man replied, that on sounding, 
he saw the lead in the water at a distance of many 
fathoms more than he had seen it before ; that therefore 
the water was become clear all of a sudden, which he 
looked upon as a certain sign of an impending hurricane 
in the sea." The sequel of the story is, that by good 
fortune, and by dint of rowing, they managed to gain a 
safe harbor before the hurricane had reached its height ; 
but it finally raged with so much violence, that not only 
many ships were lost and houses unroofed, but even their 
own vessel in harbor was washed so far on shore that 
several weeks elapsed before it could be got off. 

The Greeks would not have called the ocean drpvyeTosy 
or unfruitful, though it does not produce wheat, if they 
had viewed it by the light of modern science, for natu- 
ralists now assert that " the sea, and not the land, is the 
principal seat of life," — though not of vegetable life. 
Darwin affirms that " our most thickly inhabited forests 
appear almost as deserts when we come to compare them 
with the corresponding regions of the ocean." Agassiz 
and Gould tell us that " the sea teems with animals of 
all classes, far beyond the extreme point of flowering 
plants"; but they add, that "experiments of dredging 
in very deep water have also taught us that the abyss of 
the ocean is nearly a desert"; — "so that modern in- 
vestigations," to quote the words of Desor, " merely go 
to confirm the great idea which was vaguely anticipated 
by the ancient poets and philosophers, that the Ocean is 
the origin of all things." Yet marine animals and plants 
hold a lower rank in the scale of being than land animals 
and plants. " There is no instance known," says Desor, 
" of an animal becoming aquatic in its perfect state, after 
having hved in its lower stage on dry land," but as in 



THE BEACH AGAIN. 117 

the case of the tadpole, " the progress invariably points 
towards the dry land." In short, the dry land itself 
came through and out of the water in its way to the 
heavens, for, " in going back through the geological ages, 
we come to an epoch when, according to all appearances, 
the dry land did not exist, and when the surface of our 
globe was entirely covered with water." We looked on 
the sea, then, once more, not as drpvyeTos, or unfruitful, 
but as it has been more truly called, the " laboratory of 
continents." 

Though we have indulged in some placid reflections 
of late, the reader must not forget that the dash and roar 
of the waves were incessant. Indeed, it would be well 
if he were to read with a large conch-shell at his ear. 
But notwithstanding that it was very cold and windy to- 
day, it was such a cold as we thought would not cause 
one to take cold who was exposed to it, owing to the 
saltness of the air and the dryness of the soil. Yet the 
author of the old Description of Wellfleet says : " The 
atmosphere is very much impregnated with saline par- 
ticles, which, perhaps, with the great use of fish, and the 
neglect of cider and spruce-beer, may be a reason why 
the people are more subject to sore mouths and throats 
than in other places." 



VII. 
ACROSS THE CAPE. 

When we have returned from the sea-side, we some- 
times ask ourselves why we did not spend more time in 
gazing at the sea ; but very soon the traveller does not 
look at the sea more than at the heavens. As for the 
interior, if the elevated sand-bar in the midst of the 
ocean can be said to have any interior, it was an 
exceedingly desolate landscape, with rarely a cultivated 
or cultivable field in sight. We saw no villages, and 
seldom a house, for these are generally on the Bay side. 
It was a succession of shrubby hills and valleys, now 
wearing an autumnal tint. You would frequently think, 
from the character of the surface, the dwarfish trees, and 
the bearberries around, that you were on the top of a 
mountain. The only wood in Eastham was on the edge 
of Wellfleet. The pitch-pines were not commonly more 
than fifteen or eighteen feet high. The larger ones were 
covered with lichens, — often hung with the long gray 
Usnea. There is scarcely a white-pine on the forearm 
of the Cape. Yet in the northwest part of Eastham, 
near the Camp Ground, we saw, the next summer, some 
quite rural, and even sylvan retreats, for the Cape, 
where small rustling groves of oaks and locusts and 
whispering pines, on perfectly level ground, made a little 



ACROSS THE CAPE. 119 

paradise. The locusts, both transplanted and growing 
naturally about the houses there, appeared to flourish 
better than any other tree. There were thin belts of 
wood in Wellfleet and Truro, a mile or more from the 
Athuitic, but, for the most part, we could see the horizon 
through them, or, if extensive, the trees were not large. 
Both oaks and pines had often the same flat look with 
the apple-trees. Commonly, the oak woods twenty -five 
years old were a mere scraggy shrubbery nine or ten 
feet high, and we could frequently reach to their topmost 
leaf. Much that is called " woods " was about half as 
high as this, — only patches of shrub-oak, bayberry, 
beach-plum, and wild roses, overrun with woodbine. 
"When the roses were in bloom, these patches in the 
midst of the sand displayed such a profusion of blossoms, 
mingled with the aroma of the bayberry, that no Italian 
or other artificial rose-garden could equal them. They 
were perfectly Elysian, and realized my idea of an oasis 
in the desert. Huckleberry-bushes were very abundant, 
and the next summer they bore a remarkable quantity 
of that kind of gall called Huckleberry-apple, forming 
quite handsome though monstrous blossoms. But it 
must be added, that this shrubbery swarmed with wood- 
ticks, sometimes very troublesome parasites, and which 
it takes very horny fingers to crack. 

The inhabitants of these towns have a great regard 
for a tree, though their standard for one is necessarily 
neither large nor high ; and when they tell you of the 
large trees that once grew here, you must think of them, 
not as absolutely large, but large compared with the 
present generation. Their " brave old oaks," of which 
they speak with so much respect, and which they will 
point out to you as rehcs of the primitive forest, 



^^^ CAPE COD. 



one hundred or one hundred and fiftj, ay, for au<rht 
they know, two hundred years old, have a ridicu- 
lously dwarfish appearance, which excites a Fmile in 
the beholder. The largest and most venerable which 
they will show you in such a case are, perhaps, not 
more than twenty or twenty-five feet high. I was 
especially amused by the Liliputian old oaks in the 
south part of Truro. To the inexperienced eye, which 
appreciated their- proportions only, they might appear 
vast as the tree which saved his royal majesty, but 
measured, they were dwarfed at once almost into lichens 
which a deer might eat up in a morning. Yet they will 
tell you that large schooners were once built of timber 
which grew in Wellfleet. The old houses also are built 
of the timber of the Cape; but instead of the forests in 
the midst of which they originally stood, barren heaths, 
with poverty-grass for heather, now stretch away on 
every side. The modern houses are built of what is 
called "dimension timber," imported from Maine, all 
ready to be set up, so that commonly they do not touch 
it again with an axe. Almost all the wood used for fuel 
is imported by vessels or currents, and of course all the 
coal. I was told that probably a quarter of the fuel and 
a considerable part of the lumber used in North Truro 
was drift-wood. Many get all their fuel from the 
beach. 

Of birds not found in the interior of the State, ■— at 
least in my neighborhood, — I heard, in the summer, the 
Black-throated Bunting {Fringilla Americana) amid the 
shrubbery, and in the open land the Upland Plover 
{Totanus Bartramius), whose quivering notes were ever 
and anon prolonged into a clear, somewhat plaintive, 
yet hawk-like scream, which sounded a^ a very indefi- 



ACROSS THE CAPK 121 

nite distance. The bird may have been in the next 
field, though it sounded a mile off. 

To-day we were walking through Truro, a town of 
about eighteen hundred inhabitants. We had already 
come to Pamet River, which empties into the Bay. 
This was the limit of the Pilgrims' journey up the Cape 
from Proviucetown, when seekmg a place for settlement. 
It rises in a hollow within a few rods of the Atlantic, 
and one who lives near its source told us that in high 
tides the sea leaked through, yet the wind and waves 
preserve intact the barrier between them, and thus the 
whole river is steadily driven westward butt-end fore- 
most, — fountain-head, channel, and Hgbt-house at the 
mouth, all together. 

Early in the afternoon we reached the Highland 
Light, whose white tower we had seen rii^ing out of the 
bank in front of us for the last mile or two. It is four- 
teen miles from the Nauset Lights, on -what is called the 
Clay Pounds, an immense bed of clay abutting on the 
Atlantic, and, as the keeper told us, stretching quite 
across the Cape, which is here only about two miles 
wide. We perceived at once a difference in the soil, for 
there was an interruption of the desert, and a slight 
appearance of a sod under our feet, such as we had not 
seen for the last two days. 

After arranging to lodge at the light-house, we ram- 
bled across the Cape to the Bay, over a singularly bleak 
and barren looking country, consisting of rounded hills 
and hollows, called by geologists diluvial elevations and 
depressions, — a kind of scenery which has been com- 
pared to a chopped sea, though this suggests too sudden 
a transition. There is a delineation of this very land- 
scape in Hitchcock's Report on the r4eo]ogy of Massa- 



122 CAPE COD. 

chusetts, a work which, by its size at least, reminds one 
of a diluvial elevation itself. Looking southward from 
the light-house, the Cape appeared like an elevated 
plateau, sloping very regularly, though slightly, down- 
ward from the edge of the bank on the Atlantic side, 
about one hundred and fifty feet above the ocean, to 
that on the Bay side. On traversing this we found it 
to be interrupted by broad valleys or gullies, which 
become the hollows in the bank when the sea has worn 
up to them. They are commonly at right angles with 
the shore, and often extend quite across the Cape. 
Some of the valleys, however, are circulai-, a hundred 
feet deep without any outlet, as if the Cape had sunk in 
those places, or its sands had run out. The few scat- 
tered houses which we passed, being placed at the bot- 
tom of the hollows for shelter and fertility, were, for the 
most part, concealed entirely, as much as if they had 
been swallowed up in the earth. Even a village with 
its meeting-house, which we had left little more than 
a stone's throw behind, had sunk into the earth, spire 
and all, and we saw only the surface of the upland 
and the sea on either hand. When approaching it, we 
had mistaken the belfry for a summer-house on the 
plain. We began to think that we might tumble into 
a village before we were aware of it, as into an ant- 
lion's hole, and be drawn into the sand irrecoverably. 
The most conspicuous objects on the land were a dis- 
tant windmill, or a meeting-house standing alone, for 
only they could afford to occupy an exposed place. 
A great part of the township, however, is a barren, 
heath-like plain, and perhaps one third of it lies in 
common, though the property of individuals. The 
author of the old " Description of Truro," speaking 



ACROSS THE CAPE. 123 

of the soil, says : " The snow, which would be of 
essential service to it provided it lay level and cov- 
ered the ground, is blown into drifts and into the sea." 
This pecuhar open country, with here and there a 
patch of shrubbery, extends as much as seven miles, 
or from Pamet River on the south to High Head on 
the north, and from Ocean to Bay. To walk over it 
makes on a stranger such an impression as being at 
sea, and he finds it impossible to estimate distances in 
any weather. A windmill or a herd of cows may seem 
to be far away in the horizon, yet, after going a few 
rods, he will be close upon them. He is also deluded 
by other kinds of mirage. When, in the summer, I saw 
a family a-blueberrying a mile off, walking about amid 
the dwarfish bushes which did not come up higher than 
their ankles, they seemed to me to -be a race of giants, 
twenty feet high at least. 

The highest and sandiest portion next the Atlantic 
was thinly covered with Beach-grass and Indigo-weed. 
Next to this the surface of the upland generally con- 
sisted of white sand and gravel, like coarse salt, through 
which a scanty vegetation found its way up. It will 
give an ornithologist some idea of its barrenness if I 
mention that the next June, the month of grass, I 
found a night-hawk's eggs there, and that almost any 
square rod thereabouts, taken at random, would be an 
eligible site for such a deposit. The kildeer-plover, 
which loves a similar locality, also drops its eggs there, 
and fills the air above with its din. This upland also 
produced Cladonia lichens, poverty-grass, savory -leaved 
aster {Dt'plopappiis linariifolius), mouse-ear, bearberry, 
&c. On a few hillsides the savory-leaved aster and 
mouse-ear alone made quite a dense sward, said to be 



124 CAPE COD. 

very pretty when the aster is in bloom. In some parts 
the two species of poverty-grass {Hudsonia tomentosa 
and ericoides), which deserve a better name, reign for 
miles in little hemispherical tufts or islets, like moss, 
scattered over the waste. They linger in bloom there 
till the middle of July. Occasionally near the beach 
these rounded beds, as also those of the sea-sandwort 
{Honkenya peploides), were filled with sand within an inch 
of their tops, and were hard, hke large ant-hills, while the 
surrounding sand was soft. In summer, if the poverty- 
grass grows at the head of a Hollow looking toward the 
sea, in a bleak position where the wind rushes up, the 
northern or exposed half of the tuft is sometimes all 
black and dead like an oven-broom, while the opposite 
half is yellow with blossoms, the whole hillside thus 
presenting a remarkable contrast when seen from the 
poverty-stricken and the flourishing side. This plant, 
which in many places would be esteemed an orna- 
ment, is here despised by many on account of its 
being associated with barrenness. It might well be 
adopted for the Barnstable coat-of-arms, in a field 
sahleux. I should be proud of it. Here and there 
W'cre tracts of Beach-grass mingled with the Sea-side 
Golden-rod and Beach-pea, which reminded us still more 
forcibly of the ocean. 

We read that there was not a brook in Truro. Yet 
there were deer here once, which must often have panted 
in vain ; but I am pretty sure that I afterward saw a 
small fresli-water brook emptying into the south side of 
Pamet River, though I was so heedless as not to taste 
it. At any rate, a little boy near by told me that he 
drank at it. There was not a tree as far as we could 
see, and that was many miles each way, the general 



ACROSS THE CAPE. 125 

level of the upland being about the same everywhere. 
Even frgm the Atlantic side we overlooked the Bay, and 
saw to Manomet Point in Plymouth, and better from 
that side because it was the highest. The almost univer- 
sal bareness and smoothness of the landscape were as 
agreeable as novel, making it so much the more like the 
deck of a vessel. We saw vessels sailing south into the 
Bay, on • the one hand, and north along the Atlantic 
shore, on the other, all with an aft wind. 

The single road which runs lengthwise the Cape, now 
winding over the plain, now through the shrubbery 
which scrapes the wheels of the stage, was a mere cart- 
track in the sand, commonly without any fences to con- 
fine it, and continually changing from this side to that, to 
harder ground, or sometimes to avoid the tide. But the 
inhabitants travel the waste here and there pilgrim-wise 
and staff in hand, by narrow footpaths, through which 
the sand flows out and reveals the nakedness of the land. 
We shuddered at the thought of living there and taking 
our afternoon walks over those barren swells, where we 
could overlook every step of our walk before taking it, 
and would have to pray for a fog or a snow-storm to 
conceal our destiny. The walker there must soon eat 
his heart. 

In the north part of the town there is no house from 
shore to shore for several miles, and it is as wild and soli- 
tary as the Western Prairies — used to be. Indeed, one 
who has seen every house in Truro will be surprised to 
hear of the number of the inhabitants, but perhaps five 
hundred of the men and boys of this small town were 
then abroad on their fishing-grounds. Only a few men 
stay at home to till the sand or watch for blaekfish. 
The farmers are fishermen-farmers and understand better 



126 CAPE COD. 

ploughing the sea than the land. They do not disturb 
their sands much, though there is a plenty of sea-weed in 
the creeks, to say nothing of black fish occasionally rot- 
ting on the shore. Between the Pond and East Harbor 
Village there was an interesting plantation of pitch-pines, 
twenty or thirty acres in extent, like those which we had 
already seen from the stage. One who lived near said 
that the land was purchased by two men for a shilling 
or twenty-five cents an acre. Some is not considered 
worth writing a deed for. This soil or sand, which was 
partially covered with poverty and beach grass, sorrel, &c., 
was furrowed at intervals of about four feet and the seed 
dropped by a machine. The pines had come up admirably 
and grown the first year three or four inches, and the 
second six inches and more. Where the seed had been 
lately planted the white sand was freshly exposed in an 
endless furrow winding round and round the sides of the 
deep hollows, in a vortical spiral manner, which pro- 
duced a very singular effect, as if you were looking into 
the reverse side of a vast banded shield. This experi- 
ment, so important to the Cape, appeared very success- 
ful, and perhaps the time will come when the greater 
part of this kind of land in Barnstable County will be 
thus covered with an artificial pine forest, as has been 
done in some parts of France. In that country 12,500 
acres of downs had been thus covered in 1811 near 
Bayonne. They are called pignadas, and according to 
Loudon "constitute the principal riches of the inhab- 
itants, where there was a drifting desert before." It 
seemed a nobler kind of grain to raise than corn even. 

A few years ago Truro was remarkable among the 
Cape towns for the number of sheep raised in it ; but I 
was told that at this time only two men kept sheep in the 



ACROSS THE CAPE. 127 

town, and in 1855, a Truro boy ten years old told me 
that lie had never seen one. They were formerly pas- 
tured on the unfenced lands or general fields, but now 
the owners were more particular to assert their rights, 
and it cost too much for fencing. The rails are cedar 
from Maine, and two rails will answer for ordinary pur- 
poses, but four are required for sheep. This was the 
reason assigned by one who had formerly kept them for 
not keeping them any longer. Fencing stuff is so ex- 
pensive that I saw fences made with only one rail, 
and very often the rail when split was carefully tied 
with a string. In one of the villages I saw the next 
summer a cow tethered by a rope six rods long, the rope 
long in proportion as the feed was short and thin. Sixty 
rods, ay, all the cables of the Cape, would have been no 
more than fair. Tethered in the desert for fear that she 
would get into Arabia Felix ! I helped a man weigh a 
bundle of hay which he was selling to his neighbor, 
holding one end of a pole from which it swung by a steel- 
yard hook, and this was just half his whole crop. In 
short, the country looked so barren that I several times 
refrained from asking the inhabitants for a string or a 
piece of wrapping-paper, for fear I should rob them, for 
they plainly were obliged to import these things as well 
as rails, and w^here there w^ere no news-boys, I did not 
see what they would do for waste paper. 

The objects around us, the make-shifts of fishermen 
ashore, often made us look down to see if we were stand- 
ing on terra firma. In the wells everywhere a block 
and tackle were used to raise the bucket, instead of a 
windlass, and by almost every house was laid up a spar 
or a plank or two full of auger-holes, saved from a 
wreck. The, windmills were partly built of these, and 



128 CAPE COD. 

they were worked into the public bridges. The light- 
house keeper, who was having his barn shingled, told mo 
casually that he had made three thousand good shingles 
for that purpose out of a mast. You would sometimes 
see an old oar used for a rail. Frequently also some 
fair-weather finery ripped off a vessel by a storm near 
the coast was nailed up against an outhouse. I saw 
fastened to a shed near the light-house a long new sign 
with the words "Anglo Saxon" on it in large gilt let- 
ters, as if it were a useless part which the ship could 
afford to lose, or which the sailors had discharged at the 
same time with the pilot. But it interested somewhat 
as if it had been a part of the Argo, clipped oflf in passing 
through the Symplegades. 

To the fisherman, the Cape itself is a sort of store- 
ship laden with supplies, — a safer and larger craft which 
carries the women and children, the old men and the 
sick, and indeed sea-phrases are as common on it as on 
board a ves?el. Thus is it ever with a sea-going people. 
The old Northmen used to speak of the " keel-ridge " of 
the country, that is, the ridge of the DofFrafield ]\Iountains, 
as if the land were a boat turned bottom up. I was 
frequently reminded of the Northmen here. The in- 
habitants of the Cape are often at once farmers and sea- 
rovers ; they are more than vikings or kings of the 
bays, for their sway extends over the open sea also. A 
farmer in Wellfleet, at whose house I afterward spent a 
night, who had raised fifty bushels of potatoes the pre- 
vious year, which is a large crop for the Cape, and had 
extensive salt-works, pointed to his schooner, which lay 
in sight, in which he and his man and boy occasionally 
ran down the coast a-trading as far as the Capes of Vir 
ginia. This was his market-cart, and his hired man 



ACROSS THE CAPE. 129 

knew how to steer her. Thus he drove two teams 

a-field, 

" ere the high seas appeared 
Under tlie opening eyelids of the morn." 

Though probably he would not hear much of the " graj- 
fly " on his way to Virginia. 

A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are 
always thus abroad about their teaming on some ocean 
highway or other, and the history of one of their ordi- 
nary trips would cast the Argonautic expedition into the 
shade. I have just heard of a Cape Cod captain who 
was expected home in the beginning of the winter from 
the West Indies, but was long since given up for lost, 
till his relations at length have heard with joy, that, after 
getting within forty miles of Cape Cod light, he \^as, driven 
back by nine successive gales to Key West, between Flor- 
ida and Cuba, and was once again shaping his course 
for home. Thus he spent his winter. In ancient times 
the adventures of these two or three men and boys would 
have been made the basis of a myth, but now such tales 
are crowded into a line of short-hand signs, like an alge- 
braic formula in the shipping news. " Wherever over 
the world," said Palfrey in his oration at Barnstable, 
" you see the stars and stripes floating, you may have 
good hope that beneath them some one will be found 
who can tell you the soundings of Barnstable, or Well- 
fleet, or Chatham Harbor." 

I passed by the home of somebody's (or everybody's) 
Uncle Bill, one day over on the Plymouth shore. It 
was a schooner half keeled-up on the mud : we aroused 
the master out of a sound sleep at noonday, by thump- 
ing on the bottom of his vessel till he presented himself 
at the hatch-way, for we wanted to borrow his clam-dig- 
6* I 



1 



130 CAPE COD. 

ger. Meaning to make him a call, I looked out the next 
morning, and lo ! he had run over to '' the Pines " the i 
evening before, fearing an easterly storm. He outrode | 
the great gale in the spring of 1851, dashing about alone 
in Plymouth Bay. He goes after rockweed, lighters 
vessels, and saves wrecks. I still saw him lying in the I 
mud over at " the Pines " in the horizon, which place he 
could not leave if he would, till flood tide. But he 
would not then probably. This waiting for the tide is a 
singular feature in life by the sea-shore. A frequent 
answer is, " Well ! you can't start for two hours yet." It 
is something new to a landsman, and at first he is not 
disposed to wait. History says that " two inhabitants 
of Truro were the first who adventured to the Falkland 
Isles in pursuit of whales. This voyage was undertaken 
in the year 1774, by the advice of Admiral Montague 
of the British navy, and was crowned with success." 

At the Pond Village we saw a pond three eighths of 
a mile long densely filled with cat-tail flags, seven feet 
high, — enough for all the coopers in New England. 

The western shore was nearly as sandy as the eastern, 
but the water was much smoother, and the bottom was 
partially covered with the slender gi-ass-like sea-weed 
(Zostera), which we had not seen on the Atlantic side ; 
there were also a few rude sheds for trying fish on the 
beach there, which made it appear less wild. In the few 
marshes on this side we afterward saw Samphii-e, Rose- 
mary, and other plants new to us inlanders. 

In the summer and fall sometimes, hundreds of black- 
fish (the Social Whale, Globicepkalus melas of De Kay ; 
called also Black Whale-fish, Howling Whale, Bottle- 
head, &c.), fifteen feet or more in length, are driven 
ashore in a single school here. I witnessed such a scene 



ACROSS THE CAPE. 131 

in July, 1855. A carpenter who was working at the 
light-house arriving early in the morning remarked that 
he did not know but he had lost fifty dollars by coming 
to his work ; for as he came along the Bay side he heard 
them driving a school of blackfish ashore, and he had 
debated with himself whether he should not go and join 
them and take his share, but had concluded to come to 
his work. After breakfast I came over to this place, 
about two miles distant, and near the beach met some of 
the fishermen returning from their chase. Looking up 
and down the shore, I could see about a mile south some 
large black masses on the sand, which I knew must be 
blackfish, and a man or two about thera. As I walked 
along towards them I soon came to a huge carcass whose 
head was gone and whose blubber had been stripped off 
some weeks before ; the tide was just beginning to move 
it, and the stench compelled me to go a long way 
round. When I came to Great Hollow I found a fish- 
erman and some boys on the watch, and counted about 
thirty blackfish, just killed, with many lance wounds, and 
the water was more or less bloody around. They were 
partly on shore and partly in the water, held by a rope 
round their tails till the tide should leave them. A boat 
had been somewhat stove by the tail of one. They were 
a smooth shining black, like India-rubber, and had 
remarkably simple and lumpish forms for animated 
creatures, with a blunt round snout or head, whale-like, 
and simple stiff-looking flippers. The largest were about 
fifteen feet long, but one or two were only five feet 
long, and still without teeth. The fisherman slashed 
one with his jackknife, to show me how thick the blubber 
was, — about three inches; and as I passed my finger 
through the cut it was covered 'thick with oil. The 



lo2 CAPE COD. 



1 



blubber looked like pork, and this man said that when 
they were trying it the boys would sometimes come 
round with a piece of bread in one hand, and take a 
piece of blubber in the other to eat with it, preferring it 
to pork scraps. He also cut into the flesh beneath, 
which was firm and red like beef, and he said that for 
his pait he preferred it when fresh to beef. It is stated 
that in 1812 blackfish were used as food by the poor of 
Bretagne. They were waiting for the tide to leave these 
fishes high and dry, that they might strip oflT the blubber 
and carry it to their try-works in their boats, where they 
try it on the beach. They get commonly a barrel of 
oil, worth fifteen or twenty dollars, to a fish. There 
were many lances and harpoons in the boats, — much 
slenderer instruments than I had expected. An old man 
came along the beach with a horse and wagon distribut- 
ing the dinners of the fishermen, which their wives had 
put up in little pails and jugs, and which he had collected 
in the Pond Village, and for this service, I suppose, he 
received a share of the oil. If one could not tell his 
own pail, he took the first he came to. 

As I stood there they raised the cry of "another 
school," and we could see their black backs and their 
blowing about a 'mile northward, as they went leaping 
over the sea like horses. Some boats were already in 
pursuit there, driving them toward the beach. Other 
fishermen and boys running up began to jump into the 
boats and push them off from where I stood, and I might 
have gone too had I chosen. Soon there were twenty- 
five or thirty boats in pursuit, some large ones under 
sail, and others rowing with might and main, keeping 
outside of the school, those nearest to the fishes striking 
on the sides of their boats and blowing horns to drive 



ACROSS THE CAPE. 133 

them on to the beacli. It was an exciting race. If they 
succeed in driving them ashore each boat takes one share, 
and then each man, but if they are compelled to strike 
them off shore each boat's company take what they strike. 
I walked rapidly along the shore toward the north, while 
the fishermen were rowing still more swiftly to join their 
companions, and a little boy who walked by my side was 
congratulating himself that his father's boat was beating 
another one. An old blind fisherman whom we met, 
inquired, " Where are they, I can't see. Have they got 
them ? " In the mean while the fishes had turned and 
were escaping northward toward Provincetown, only 
occasionally the back of one being seen. So the nearest 
crews w^ere compelled to strike them, and we saw several 
boats soon made fast, each to its fish, which, four or five 
rods ahead was drawing it like a race-horse straight 
toward the beach, leaping half out of water blowing blood 
and water from its hole, and leaving a streak of foam 
behind. But they went ashore too far north for us, 
though we could see the fishermen leap out and lance 
them on the sand. It was just like pictures of whaling 
which I have seen, and a fisherman told me that it was 
nearly as dangerous. In his first trial he had been much 
excited, and in his haste had used a lance with its scab- 
bard on, but nevertheless had thrust it quite through his 
fish. 

I learned that a few days before this one hundred and 
eighty blackfish had been driven ashore in one school 
at Eastham, a little farther south, and that the keeper of 
BilHngsgate Point light went out one morning about the 
same time and cut his initials on the backs of a large 
school which had run ashore in the night, and sold his 
right to them to Provincetown for one thousand dollars, 



134 CAPE COD. 

and probably Provincetown made as much more. An- 
other fisherman told me that nineteen years ago three 
hundred and eighty were driven ashore in one school at 
Great Hollow. In the Naturalists' Library, it is said 
that, in the winter of 1809 - 10, one thousand one hundred 
and ten " approached the shore of Hralfiord, Iceland, and 
were captured." De Kay says it is not known why 
they are stranded. But one fisherman declared to me 
that they ran ashore in pursuit of squid, and that they 
generally came on the coast about the last of July. 

About a week afterward, when I came to this shore, 
it was strewn as far as I could see with a glass, with 
the carcasses of blackfish stripped of their blubber and 
their heads cut off; the latter lying higher up. Walk- 
ing on the beach was out of the question on account of 
the. stench. Between Provincetown and Truro they lay 
in the very path of the stage. Yet no steps were taken 
to abate the nuisance, and men were catching lobsters 
as usual just off the shore. I was told that they did 
sometimes tow them out aod sink them ; yet I wondered 
•where they got the stones to sink them with. Of course 
they might be made into guano, and Cape Cod is not so 
fertile that her inhabitants can afford to do without this 
manure, — to say nothing of the diseases they may pro- 
duce. 

After my return home, wishing to learn what was 
known about the Blackfish, I had recourse to the re- 
ports of the zoological surveys of the State, and I found 
that Storer had rightfully omitted it in his Report on the 
Fishes, since it is not a fish ; so I turned to Emmons's 
Report of the Mammalia, but was surprised to find that 
the seals and whales were omitted by him, because he 
had had no opportunity to observe them. Considering 



ACROSS THE CAPE. 135 

now this State has risen and thriven by its fisheries, — 
that the legislature which authorized the Zoological Sur- 
vey sat under the emblem of a codfish, — that Nan- 
tucket and New Bedford are within our limits, — that 
an early riser may find a thousand or fifteen hundred 
dollars' worth of blackfish on the shore in a morning, — 
that the Pilgrims saw the Indians cutting up a blackfish 
on the shore at Eastham, and called a part of that shore 
" Grampus Bay," from the number of blackfish they 
found there, before they got to Plymouth, — and that 
from that time to this these fishes have continued to 
enrich one or two counties almost annually, and that 
their decaying carcasses were now poisoning the air of 
one county for more than thirty miles, — I thought it 
remarkable that neither the popular nor scientific name 
was to be found in a report on our mammalia, — a cata- 
logue of the productions of our land and water. 

We had here, as well as all across the Cape, a fair 
view of Provincetown, five or six miles distant over the 
water toward the west, under its shrubby sand-hills, with 
its harbor now full of vessels whose masts mingled with 
the spires of its churches, and gave it the appearance 
of a quite large seaport town. 

The inhabitants of all the lower Cape towns enjoy 
thus the prospect of two seas. Standing on the western 
or larboard shore, and looking across to where the dis- 
tant mainland looms, they can say, This is Massachu- 
setts Bay ; and then, after an hour's sauntering walk, 
they may stand on the starboard side, beyond which 
no land is seen to loom, and say, This is the Atlantic 
Ocean. 

On our way back to the light-house, by whose white- 
washed tower we steered as securely as the mariner by 



136 CAPE COD. 



1 



its lif^ht at night, we passed through a graveyard, which 
apparently was saved from being blown away by its t 
slates, for they had enabled a thick bed of huckleberry- 1 
bushes to root themselves amid the graves. "VYe thought 
it would be worth the while to read the epitaphs where 
so many were lost at sea ; however, as not only their | 
lives, but commonly their bodies also, were lo^t or not 
identified, there were fewer epitaphs of this sort than we 
expected, though there were not a few. Their grave- 
yard is the ocean. Near the- eastern side we started up 
a fox in a hollow, the only kind of wild quadruped, if' 
I except a skunk in a salt-marsh, that we saw in all 
our walk (unless painted and box tortoises may be 
called quadrupeds). He was a large, plump, shaggy 
fellow, like a yellow dog, with, as usual, a white tip 
to his tail, and looked as if he fared well on the Cape. 
He cantered away into the shrub-oaks and bayberry- 
bushes which chanced to grow there, but were hardly 
high enough to conceal him. I saw another the next 
summer leaping over the top of a beach-plum a little 
farther north, a small arc of his course (which I trust 
is not yet run), from which I endeavored in vain to cal- 
culate his whole orbit : there were too many unknown 
attractions to be allowed for. I also saw the exuvias 
of a third fast sinking into the sand, and added the skull 
to my collection. Hence I concluded that they must be 
plenty thereabouts ; but a traveller may meet with more 
than an inhabitant, since he is more likely to take an 
unfrequented route across the country. They told me 
that in some years they died off in great numbers by a 
kind of madness, under the effect of which they were 
seen whirling round and round as if in pursuit of their 
tiiils. lu Crantz's account of Greenland, he says ; " They 



ACKOSS THE CAPE. 137 

(the foxes) live upon birds and their eggs, and, when 
they can't get them, upon crow-berries, mussels, crabs, 
and what the sea casts out." 

Just before reaching the light-house, we saw the sun 
set in the Bay, — for standing on that narrow Cape was, 
as I have said, hke being on the deck of a vessel, or 
rather at the masthead of a man-of-war, thirty miles at 
sea, though we knew that at the same moment the sun 
was setting behind our native hills, which were just 
below the horizon in that direction. This sight drove 
everything else quite out of our heads, and Homer and 
the Ocean came in again with a rush, — 

*Ev 8' iVecr' 'ClKeava Xafxirpov <})dos rjeXloiOy 

the shining torch of the sun fell into the ocean. 



VIII. 
THE HIGHLAND LIGHT. 



This light-house, known to mariners as the Cape Cod 
or Highland Light, is one of our "primary sea-coast 
lights," and is usually the first seen by those approach- 
ing the entrance of Massachusetts Bay from ICurope. 
It is forty-three miles from Cape Ann Light, and forty- 
one from Boston Light. It stands about twenty rods 
from the edge of the bank, which is here formed of clay. 
I borrowed the plane and square, level and dividers, 
of a carpenter who was shingling a barn near by, and 
using one of those shingles made of a mast, contrived a 
rude sort of quadrant, with pins for sights and pivots, 
and got the angle of elevation of the Bank opposite the 
light-house, and with a couple of cod-lines the length of 
its slope, and so measured its height on the shingle. It 
rises one hundred and ten feet above its immediate base, 
or about one hundred and twenty-three feet above mean 
low water. Graham, who has carefully surveyed the ex- 
tremity of the Cape, makes it one hundred and thirty 
feet. The mixed sand and clay lay at an angle of forty 
degrees with the horizon, where I measured it, but the 
clay is generally much steeper. No cow nor hen ever 
gets down it. Half a mile farther south the bank is 
fifteen or twenty-five feet higher, and that appeared to 



THE HIGHLAND LIGHT: 139 

be the highest land in North Truro. Even this vast 
clay bank is fast wearing away. Small streams of water 
trickling down it at intervals of two or three rods, have 
left the intermediate clay in the form of steep Gothic 
roofs ■ fifty feet high or more, the ridges as sharp and 
rugged-looking as rocks ; and in one place the bank is 
curiously eaten out in the form of a large semicircular 
crater. 

According to the light-house keeper, the Cape is wast- 
ing here on both sides, though most on the eastern. In 
some places it had lost many rods within the last year, 
and, erelong, the light-house must be moved. We cal- 
culated, from his data, how soon the Cape would be 
quite worn away at this point, " for," said he, " I can 
remember sixty years back." We were even more sur- 
prised at this last announcement, — that is, at the slow 
waste of life and energy in our informant, for we had 
taken him to be not more than forty, — than at the rapid 
wasting of the Cape, and we thought that he stood a fair 
chance to outlive the former. 

Between this October and June of the next year, I 
found that the bank had lost about forty feet in one 
place, opposite the light-house, and it was cracked more 
than forty feet farther from the edge at the last date, the 
shore being strewn with the recent rubbish. But I 
judged that generally it was not wearing away here at 
the rate of more than six feet annually. Any conclu- 
sions drawn from the observations of a few years or one 
generation only are likely to prove false, and the Cape 
may balk expectation by its durability. In some places 
even a wrecker's foot-path down the bank lasts several 
years. One old inhabitant told us that when the light- 
house v^as built, in 1798, it was calculated that it would 



140 CAPE COD. 

stand forty-five years, allowing the bank to waste one 
length of fence each year, " but," said he, <' there it is " 
(or rather another near the same site, about twenty rods 
from the edge of the bank). 

The sea is not gaining on the Cape everywhere, for 
one man told me of a vessel wrecked long ago on the 
north of Provincetown whose ''hones" (this was his 
word) are still visible many rods within the present line 
of the beach, half buried in sand. Perchance they lie 
alongside the timhers of a whale. The general state- 
ment of the inhabitants is, that the Cape is wasting on 
both sides, but extending itself on particular points 
on the south and west, as at Chatham and Monomoy 
Beaches, and at Billingsgate, Long, and Race Points. 
James Freeman stated in his day that above three miles 
had been added to Monomoy Beach during the previous 
fifty years, and it is said to be still extending as fast as 
ever. A waiter in the Massachusetts Magazine, in the 
last century, tells us that " when the English first settled 
upon the Cape, there was an island off Chatham, at three 
leagues' distance, called Webbs' Island, containing twenty 
acres, covered with red-cedar or savin. The inhabitants 
of JSTantucket used to carry wood from it " ; but he adds 
that in his day a large rock alone marked the spot, and 
the water was six fathoms deep there. The entrance to 
Kauset Harbor, which was once in Eastham, has now 
travelled south into Orleans. The islands in Wellfleet 
Harbor once formed a continuous beach, though now 
small vessels pass between them. And so of many 
other parts of this coast. 

Perhaps what the Ocean takes from one part of the 
Cape it gives to another, — robs Peter to pay Paul. 
Ou the eastern side the sea appears to be everywhere 



( 



THE HIGHLAND LIGHT. 141 

encroaching on the land. Not only the land is under 
mined, and its ruins carried off by currents, but the 
sand is blown from the beach directly up the steep bank 
where it is one hundred and fifty feet high, and covers 
the original surface there many feet deep. If you sit on 
the edge you will have ocular demonstration of this by 
soon getting your eyes full. Thus the bank preserves 
its height as fast as it is worn away. ^This sand is 
steadily travelling westward at a rapid rate, " more than 
a hundred yards," says one writer, within the memory 
of inhabitants now living ; so that in some places peat- 
meadows are buried deep under the sand, and the peat 
is cut through it ; and in one place a large peat-meadow 
has made its appearance on the shore in the bank cov- 
ered many feet deep, and peat has been cut there. This 
accounts for that-great pebble of peat which we saw in 
the surf. The old oysterman had told us that many 
years ago he lost a " crittur " by her being mired in a 
swamp near the Atlantic side east of his house, and 
twenty years ago he lost the swamp itself entirely, but 
has since seen signs of it appearing on the beach. He 
also said that he had seen cedar stumps " as big as cart- 
wheels " (!) on the bottom of the Bay, three miles off 
Billingsgate Point, when leaning over the side of his 
boat in pleasant weather, and that that was dry land not 
long ago. Another told us that a log canoe known to 
have been buried many years before on the Bay side at 
East Harbor in Truro, where the Cape is extremely nar- 
row, appeared at length on the Atlantic side, the Cape 
having rolled over it, and an old woman said, — " Now, 
you see, it is true what I told you, that the Cape is 
moving." 

The bars along the coast shift with every storm, and 



142 CAPE COD. 

in many places there is occasionally none at all. We 
ourselves observed the effect of a single storm with a 
high tide in the night, in July, 1855. It moved the sand 
on the beach opposite the light-house to the depth of 
six feet, and three rods in width as ftir as w^e could see 
north and south, and carried it bodily off no one knows 
exactly where, laying bare in one place a large rock 
five feet high which was invisible before, and narrow- 
ing the beach to that extent. There is usually, as I 
have said, no bathing on the back side of the Cape, on 
account of the undertow, but when we were there last, 
the sea had, three months before, cast up a bar near this 
light-house, two miles long and ten rods wide, over which 
the tide did not flow, leaving a narrow cove, then a 
quarter of a mile long, between it and the shore, which 
afforded excellent bathing. This cove had from time to 
time been closed up as the bar travelled northward, in 
one instance imprisoning four or five hundred whiting 
and cod, which died there, and the water as often turned 
fresh and finally gave place to sand. This bar, the in- 
habitants assured us, might be wholly removed, and the 
water six feet deep there in two or three days. 

The light-house keeper said that when the wind blowed 
strong on to the shore, the waves ate fast into the bank, 
but when it blowed off they took no sand away ; for in 
the former case the wind heaped up the surface of the 
water next to the beach, and to preserve its equilibrium 
a strong undertow immediately set back again into the 
sea which carried with it the sand and whatever else was 
in the way, and left the beach hard to walk on ; but in 
the latter case the undertow set on, and carried the sand 
with it, so that it was particularly difficult for shipwrecked 
men to get to land when the wind blowed on to the shore, 



THE HIGHLAND LIGHT. 143 

but easier when it blowed off. This undertow, meeting 
the next surface wave on the bar which itself has made, 
forms part of the dam over which the latter breaks, as 
over an upright wall. The sea thus plajs with the land 
holding a sand-bar in its mouth awhile before it swallows 
it, as a cat plays with a mouse ; but the fatal gripe is 
sure to come at last. The sea sends its rapacious east 
wind to rob the land, but before the former has got far 
with its prey, the land sends its honest west wind to re- 
cover some of its own. But, according to Lieutenant 
Davis, the forms, extent, and distribution of sand-bars 
and banks are principally determined, not by winds and 
waves, but by tides. 

Our host said that you would be surprised if you were 
on the beach when the wind blew a hurricane directly 
on to it, to see that none of the drift-wood came ashore, 
but all was carried directly northward and parallel with 
the shore as fast as a man can walk, by the inshore cur- 
rent, which sets strongly in that direction at flood tide. 
The strongest swimmers also are carried along with it, 
and never gain an inch toward the beach. Even a large 
rock has been moved half a mile northward along the 
beach. He assured us that the sea was never still on 
the back side of the Cape, but ran commonly as high as 
your head, so that a great part of the time you could 
not launch a boat there, and even in the calmest weather 
the waves run six or eight feet up the beach, though 
then you could get off on a plank. Champlain and 
Pourtrincourt could not land here in 1G06, on account of 
the swell (la houUe), yet the savages came off to them 
in a canoe. In the Sieur de la Borde's " Relation des 
Caraibes," my edition of which was published at Am- 
sterdam in 1711, at page 530 he says: — 



144 CAPE COD. 

" Couroumon a Caralbe, also a star [i. e. a god], 
makes the great lames a la mer, and overturns canoes. 
Lames a la mer are the long vagiies which are not 
broken (entrecoiipees), and such as one sees come to land 
all in one piece, from one end of a beach to another, 
so that, however little wind there may be, a shallop or 
a canoe could hardly land {ahorder terre) without turn- 
ing over, or being filled with water." 

But on the Bay side the water even at its edge 
is often as smooth and still as in a pond. Commonly 
there are no boats used along this beach. There was 
a boat belonging to the Highland Light which the 
next keeper after he had been there a year had not 
launched, though he said that there was good fishing just 
ofi" the shore. Generally the Life Boats cannot be used 
when needed. When the waves run very high it is im- 
possible to get a boat off, however skilfully you steer it, 
for it will often be completely covered by the curving 
edge of the approaching breaker as by an arch, and so 
filled with water, or it will be lifted up by its bows, turned 
directly over backwards and all the contents spilled out. 
A spar thirty feet long is served in the same way. 

I heard of a party who went off fishing back of Well- 
fleet some years ago, in two boats, in calm weather, 
who, when they had laden their boats with fish, and 
approached the land again, found such a swell break- 
ing on it, though there was no wind, that- they were 
afraid to enter it. At first they thought to pull for 
Provmcetown, but night was coming on, and that was 
many miles distant. Their case seemed a desperate 
one. As often as they approached the shore and saw 
the terrible breakers that intervened, they were deterred. 
In short, they were thoroughly frightened. Finally, hav- 



THE HIGHLAND LIGHT. 145 

ing thrown their fish overboard, those in one boat chose 
a favorable opportunity, and succeeded, by skill and 
good luck, in reaching the land, but they were unwill- 
ing to take the responsibility of telling the others when 
to come in, and as the other helmsman was inexperi- 
enced, their boat was swamped at once, yet all man- 
aged to save themselves. 

Much smaller waves soon make a boat " nail-sick," as 
the phrase is. The keeper said that after a long and 
strong blow there would be three large waves, each suc- 
cessively larger than the last, and then no large ones for 
some time, and that, when they wished to land in a 
boat, they came in on the last and largest wave. Sir 
Thomas Browne (as quoted in Brand's Popular Antiq- 
uities, p. 372), on the subject of the tenth wave being 
" greater or more dangerous than any other," after quot- 
ing Ovid,— " 

" Qui venit hie fluctus, fluctus supereminet omiies 
Posterior nono est, undecimo que prior," — 

says, "Which, notwithstanding, is evidently false; nor 
can it be made out either by observation either upon the 
shore or the ocean, as we have with diligence explored 
in both. And surely in vain we expect regularity in the 
waves of the sea, or in the particular motions thereof, as 
we may in its general reciprocations, whose causes are 
constant, and effects therefore correspondent ; whereas 
its fluctuations are but motions subservient, which winds, 
storms, shores, shelves, and every interjacency, irreg- 
ulates." 

We read that the Clay Pounds were so called, " be- 
cause vessels have had the misfortune to be pounded 
against it in gales of wind," which w€ regard as a doubt- 
7 J 



146 CAPE COD. 

ful derivation. Tiiere are small ponds here, upheld by 
the clay, which were formerly called the Clay Pits. 
Perhaps this, or Clay Ponds, is the origin of the name. 
"Water is found in the clay quite near the surface ; but 
we heard of one man who had sunk a well in the sand 
close by, "till he could see stars at noonday," without 
finding any. Over this bai-e Highland the wind has full 
sweep. Even in July it blows the wings over the heads 
of the young turkeys, which do not know enough to 
head against it ; and in gales the doors and windows are 
blown in, and you must hold on to the light-house to pre- 
vent being blown into the Atlantic. They who merely 
keep out on the beach in a storm in the winter are some- 
times rewarded by the Humane Society. If you would 
feel the full force of a tempest, take up your residence 
on the top of Mount Washington, or at the Highland 
Light, in Truro. 

It was said in 1794 that more vessels were cast away 
on the east shore of Truro than anywhere in Barnstable 
County. Notwithstanding that this light-house has since 
been erected, after almost every stomi we read of one or 
more vessels wrecked here, and sometimes more than a 
dozen wrecks are visible from this point at one time. 
The inhabitants hear the crash of vessels going to pieces 
as they sit round their hearths, and they commonly 
date from some memorable shipwreck. If the history 
of this beach could be written from beginning to end, 
it would be a thi'iUing page in the history of com- 
merce. 

Truro was settled in the year 1700 as Dangerfield, 
This was a very appropriate name, for I afterward read 
on a monument in the graveyard, near Pamet River, the 
following inscription : — 



THE HIGHLAND LIGHT. 147 

Sacred 

to the memory of 

57 citizens of Truro, 

who were lost in seven 

vessels, which 

foundered at sea in 

the memorable gale 

of Oct. 3d, 1841. 

Their names and ages by families were recorded on dif- 
ferent sides of the stone. They are said to have been 
lost on George's Bank, and I was told that only one ves- 
sel drifted ashore on the back side of the Cape, with the 
boys locked into the cabin and drowned. It is said that 
the homes of all were " within a circuit of two miles.'* 
Twenty-eight inhabitants of Dennis were lost in the 
same gale ; and I read that " in one day, immediately 
after this storm, nearly or quite one hundred bodies 
were taken up and buried on Cape Cod." The Truro 
Insurance Company failed for want of skippers to take 
charge of its vessels. But the surviving inhabitants 
went a fishing again the next year as usual. I found 
that it would not do to speak of shipwrecks there, for 
almost every family has lost some of its members at 
sea. " Who lives in that house ? " I inquired. " Three 
widows," was the reply. The stranger and the inhab- 
itant view the shore with very different eyes. The 
former may have come to see and admire the ocean in 
a storm ; but the latter looks on it as the scene where his 
nearest relatives were wrecked. When I remarked to 
an old wrecker partially blind, who was sitting on the 
edge of the bank smoking a pipe, which he had just lit 
with a match of dried beach-grass, that I supposed he 
liked to hear the sound of the surf, he answered : " No, 



148 CAPE COD. 

I do not like to hear the sound of the surf." He had 
lost at least one son in " the memorable gale," and could 
tell many a tale of the shipwrecks which he had wit- 
nessed there. 

In the year 1717, a noted pirate named Bellamy was 
led on to the bar off Wellfieet by the captain of a snow 
which he had taken, to whom he had offered his vessel 
again if he would pilot him into Provincetown Harbor. 
Tradition says that the latter threw over a burning tar- 
barrel in the night, which drifted ashore, and the pirates 
followed it. A storm coming on, their whole fleet was 
wrecked, and more than a hundred dead bodies lay along 
the shore. Six who escaped shipwreck were executed. 
"At times to this day" (1793), says the historian of 
Wellfleet, " there are King William and Queen Mary's 
coppers picked up, and pieces of silver called cob-money. 
The violence of the seas moves the sands on the outer 
bar, so that at times the iron caboose of the ship [that 
is, Bellamy's] at low ebbs has been seen." Another 
tells us that, " For many years after this shipwreck, a 
man of a very singular and frightful aspect used every 
spring and autumn to be seen travelling on the Cape, 
who was supposed to have been one of Bellamy's crew. 
The presumption is that he went to some place where 
money had been secreted by the pirates, to get such a 
supply as his exigencies required. When he died, many 
pieces of gold were found in a girdle which he con- 
stantly wore." 

As I was walking on the beach here in my last visit, 
looking for shells and pebbles, just after that storm which 
I have mentioned as moving the sand to a great depth, 
not knowing but I might find some cob-money, I did 
actually pick up a French crown piece, worth about a 



THE HIGHLAND LIGHT. 149 

dollar and six cents, near high-water mark, on the still 
moist sand, just under the abrupt, caving base of the 
bank. It was of a dark slate color, and looked like a 
flat pebble, but still bore a very distinct and handsome 
head of Louis XV., and the usual legend on the reverse, 
Sit Nomen Domini Benedictum (Blessed be the Name 
of the Lord), a pleasing sentiment to read in the sands 
of the sea-shore, whatever it might be stamped on, and 
I also made out the date, 1741. Of course, I thought 
at first that it was that same old button which I have 
found so many times, but my knife soon showed the 
silver. Afterward, rambling on the bars at low tide, I 
cheated my companion by holding up round shells (*Scw- 
tellce) between my fingers, whereupon he quickly stripped 
and came off to me. 

In the Revolution, a British ship of war called the 
Somerset was wrecked near the Clay Pounds, and all 
on board, some hundreds in number, were taken prison- 
ers. My informant said that he had never seen any 
mention of this in the histories, but that at any rate he 
knew of a silver watch, which one of those prisoners by 
accident left there, which was still going to tell the story. 
But this event is noticed by some writers. 

The next summer I saw a sloop from Chatham drag- 
ging for anchors and chains just off this shore. She 
had her boats out at the work while she shuffled about 
on various tacks, and, when anything was found, drew 
up to hoist it on board. It is a singular employment, at 
which men are regularly hired and paid for their indus- 
try, to hunt to-day in pleasant weather for anchors which 
have been lost, — the sunken faith and hope of mariners, 
to which they trusted in vain ; now, perchance, it is the 
rusty one of some old pirate's ship or Norman fisher- 



150 CAPE COD. 

man, whose cable parted here two hundred years ago ; 
and now the best bower anchor of a Canton or a Cali- 
fornia ship, which has gone about her business. If the 
roadsteads of the spiritual ocean could be thus dragged, 
what rusty flukes of hope deceived and paned chain- 
cables of faith might again be windlassed aboard ! 
enough to sink the finder's craft, or stock new navies 
to the end of time. The bottom of the sea is strewn 
with anchors, some deeper and some shallower, and 
alternately covered and uncovered by the sand, per- 
chance with a small length of iron cable still attached, 
— to which where is the other end ? So many uncon- 
cluded tales to be continued another time. So, if we 
had diving-bells adapted to the spiritual deeps, we should 
see anchors with their cables attached, as thick as eels 
in vinegar, all wriggling vainly toward their holding- 
ground. But that is not treasure for us which another 
man has lost ) rather it is for us to seek what no other 
man has found or can find, — not be Chatham men, 
dragging for anchors. 

The annals of this voracious beach ! who could write 
them, unless it were a shipwrecked sailor ? How many 
who have seen it have seen it only in the midst of dan- 
ger and distress, the last strip of earth which their mortal 
eyes beheld. Think of the amount of sufiering which 
a single strand has witnessed. The ancients would have 
represented it as a sea-monster with open jaws, more 
terrible than Scylla and Charybdis. An inhabitant of 
Truro told me that about a fortnight after the St. John 
was wrecked at Cohasset he found two bodies on the 
shore at the Clay Pounds. They were those of a man, 
and a corpulent woman. The man had thick boots on, 
though his head was off, but " it was alongside." It took 



THE HIGHLAND LIGHT. 151 

the finder some weeks to get over the sight. Perhaps 
they were man and wife, and whom God had joined the 
ocean currents had not put asunder. Yet by what slight 
accidents at first may they have been associated in their 
drifting. Some of the bodies of those passengers were 
j)icked up far out at sea, boxed up and sunk ; some 
brought ashore and buried. There are more consequen- 
ces to a shipwreck than the underwriters notice. The 
Gulf Stream may return some to their native shores, or 
drop them in some out-of-the-way cave of Ocean, where 
time and the elements will write new riddles with their 
bones. — But to return to land again. 

In this bank, above the clay, I counted in the summer, 
two hundred holes of the Bank Swallow within a space 
six rods long, and there were at least one thousand old 
birds within three times that distance, twittering over the 
surf. I had never associated them in my thoughts with 
the beach before. One little boy who had been a-birds- 
nesting had got eighty swallows' eggs for his share ! 
Tell it not to the Humane Society. There were many 
young birds on the clay beneath, which had tumbled out 
and died. Also there were many Crow-blackbirds hop- 
ping about in the dry fields, and the Upland Plover were 
breeding close by the light-house. The keeper had once 
cut off one's wing while mowing, as she sat on her eggs 
there.. This is also a favorite resort for gunners in the 
fall to shoot the Golden Plover. As around the shores of 
a pond are seen devil's-needles, butterflies, &c., so here, 
to my surprise, I saw at the same season great devil's- 
needles of a size proportionably larger, or nearly as big 
as my finger, incessantly coasting up and down the edge 
of the bank, and butterflies also were hovering over it, 
and I never saw so many dorr-bugs and beetles of viirious 



152 CAPE COD. 

kinds as strewed the beach. They had apparently 
flown over the bank in the night, and could not get up 
again, and some had perhaps fallen into the sea and wgre 
washed ashore. They may have been in part attracted 
by the light-house lamps. 

The Clay Pounds are a more fertile tract than usual. 
We saw some fine patches of roots and corn here. As 
generally on the Cape, the plants had little stalk or leaf, 
but ran remarkably to seed. The corn was hardly more 
than half as high as in the interior, yet the ears were 
large and full, and one farmer told us that he could raise 
forty bushels on an acre without manure, and sixty with 
it. The heads of the rye also were remarkably large. 
The Shadbush (Amelanchier), Beach Plums, and Blue- 
berries ( Vaccinium Pennsylvanicum), like the apple- 
trees and oaks, were very dwarfish, spreading over the 
sand, but at the same time very fruitful. The blueberry 
was but an inch or two high, and its fruit often rested on 
the ground, so that you did not suspect the presence of the 
bushes, even on those bare hills, until you were treading 
on them. I thought that this fertility must be owing 
mainly to the abundance of moisture in the atmosphere, 
for I observed that what little grass there was was re- 
markably laden with dew in the morning, and in summer 
dense imprisoning fogs frequently last till midday, turn- 
ing one's beard into a wet napkin about his throat, and 
the oldest inhabitant may lose his way within a stone's 
throw of his house or be obliged to follow the beach for 
a guide. The brick house attached to the light-house 
was exceedingly damp at that season, and writing-paper 
lost all its stiffness in it. It was impossible to dry your 
towel after bathing, or to press flowers without their mil- 
dewing. The air was so moist that we rarely wished to 



THE HIGHLAND LIGHT. 153 

drink, though we could at all times taste the salt on 
our lips. Salt was rarely used at table, and our host 
told us that his cattle invariably refused it when it was 
offered them, they got so much with their grass and at 
every breath, but he said that a sick horse or one just 
from the country would sometimes take a hearty draught 
of salt water, and seemed to like it and be the better 
for it. 

It was surprising to see how much water was con- 
tained in the terminal bud of the sea-side golden rod, 
standing in the sand early in July, and also how turnips, 
beets, carrots, &c., flourished even in pure sand. A man 
travelling by the shore near there not long before us 
noticed something green growing in the pure sand of the 
beach, just at high-water mark, and on approaching found 
it to be a bed of beets flourishing vigorously, probably 
from seed washed out of the Franklin. Also beets and 
turnips came up in the sea-weed used for manure in 
many parts of the Cape. This suggests how variou.i 
plants may have been dispersed over the world to distant 
islands and continents. Vessels, with seeds in their car- 
goes, destined for particular ports, where perhaps they 
were not needed, have been cast away on desolate islands, 
and though their crews perished, some of their seeds have 
been preserved. Out of many kinds a few would find 
a soil and climate adapted to them, — become naturalized 
and perhaps drive out the native plants at last, and so fit 
the land for the habitation of man. It is an ill wind that 
blows nobody any good, and for the time lamentable 
shipwrecks may thus contribute a new vegetable to a 
continent's stock, and prove on the whole a lasting bless- 
ing to its inhabitants. Or winds and currents might 
effect the same without the intervention of man. What 
7* 



154 CAPE COD. 

indeed are the various succulent plants which grow on 
the beach but such beds of beets and turnips, sprung 
originally from seeds w^hich perhaps were cast on the 
waters for this end, though we do not know the Frank- 
lin which they came out of ? In ancient times some Mr. 
Bell (?) was sailing this way in his ark with seeds of 
rocket, saltwort, sandwort, beach-grass, samphire, baj- 
berry, poverty-grass, &c., all nicely labelled with direc- 
tions, intending to establish a nursery somewhere ; and 
did not a nursery get established, though he thought that 
he had failed ? 

About the light-house I observed in the summer the 
pretty Poly gala polygama, spreading ray- wise flat on the 
ground, white pasture thistles {Girsium puDiilum), and 
amid the shrubbery the Smilax glauca, which is commonly 
said not to grow so far north ; near the edge of the banks 
about half a mile southward, the broom crowberry (^Em- 
petrum Oonradn), for which Plymouth is the only locality 
in Massachusetts usually named, forms pretty green 
mounds four or five feet in diameter by one foot high, — 
soft, springy beds for the wayfarer. I saw it afterward 
in Provincetown, but prettiest of all the scarlet pimper- 
nel, or poor-man's weather-glass {AnagalUs arvensis), 
greets you in fair weather on almost every square yard 
of sand. From Yarmouth, I have received the Chrys- 
opsis falcata (golden aster), and Vaccinium stamineiim 
(Deerberry or Squaw Huckleberry), with fruit not edible, 
sometimes as large as a cranberry (Sept. 7). 

The Highland Light-house,* where we were staying, is 

a substantial-looking building of brick, painted white, 

and surmounted by an iron cap. Attached to it is 

the dwelling of the keeper, one story high, also of 

* The light-house has since been rebuilt, and shows a Fresnel light. 



THE HIGHLAND LIGHT. 155 

brick, and built by government. As we were going to 
spend the night in a light-house, we wished to make the 
most of so novel an experience, and therefore told our 
host that we would like to accompany him when he went 
to light up. At rather early candle-light he lighted a 
small Japan lamp, allowing it to smoke rather more than 
we like on ordinary occasions, and told us to follow him. 
He led the way first through his bedroom, which was 
placed nearest to the light-house, and then through a 
long, narrow, covered passage-way, between whitewashed 
walls like a prison entry, into the lower part of the 
light-house, where many great -butts of oil were ar- 
ranged around ; thence we ascended by a winding and 
open iron stairway, with a steadily increasing scent of 
joil and lamp-smoke, to a trap-door in an iron floor, and 
through this into the lantern. It was a neat building, 
with everything in apple-pie order, and no danger of 
anything rusting there for want of oil. The light consist- 
ed of fifteen argand lamps, placed within smooth concave 
reflectors twenty-one inches in diameter, and arranged 
in two horizontal circles one above the other, facing 
every way excepting directly down the Cape. These 
were surrounded, at a distance of two or three feet, by 
large plate-glass windows, which defied the storms, with 
iron sashes, on which rested the iron cap. All the iron 
work, except the floor, was painted white. And thus 
the light-house was completed. We walked slowly 
round in that narrow space as the keeper lighted each 
lamp in succession, conversing with him at the same 
moment that many a sailor on the deep witnessed the 
lighting of the Highland Light. His duty was to fill 
and trim and light his lamps, and keep bright the reflec- 
tors. He filled them every morning, and trimmed them 



156 CAPE COD. 

commonly once in the course of the night. He com- 
plained of the quality of the oil which was furnished. 
Tliis house consumes about eight hundred gallons in a 
year, which cost not far from one dollar a gallon ; but 
perhaps a few lives would be saved if better oil were 
provided. Another light-house keeper said that the 
same proportion of winter-strained oil was sent to the 
southernmost light-house in the Union as to the most 
northern. Formerly, when this light-house had windows 
with small and thin panes, a severe storm would some- 
times break the glass, and then they were obliged to put 
up a wooden shutter in haste to save their lights and 
reflectors, — and sometimes in tempests, when the mari- 
ner stood most in need of their guidance, they had thus 
nearly converted the light-house into a dark lantern, 
which emitted only a few feeble rays, and those com- 
monly on the land or lee side. He spoke of the anxiety 
and sense of responsibility which he felt in cold and 
stormy nights in the winter ; when he knew that many 
a poor fellow was depending on him, and his lamps 
burned dimly, the oil being chilled. Sometimes he was 
obliged to warm the oil in a kettle in his house at mid- 
night, and fill his lamps over again, — for he could not 
have a fire in the light-house, it produced such a sweat 
on the windows. His successor told me that he could 
not keep too hot a fire in such a case. All this because 
the oil was poor. A government hghting the mari- 
ners on its wintry coast with summer-strained oil, to 
save expense ! That were surely a summer-strained 
mercy. 

This keeper's successor, who kindly entertained me 
the next year, stated that one extremely cold night, 
when this and all the neighboring lights were burning 



THE HIGHLAND LIGHT. 157 

summer oil, but he had been provident enough to re- 
serve a Httle winter oil against emergencies, he was 
waked up with anxiety, and found that his oil was con- 
gealed, and his lights almost extinguished ; and when, 
after many hours' exertion, he had succeeded in replen- 
ishing his reservoirs with winter oil at the wick end, and 
with difficulty had made them burn, he looked out and 
found that the other lights in the neighborhood, w4iich 
were usually visible to him, had gone out, and he heard 
afterward that the Paraet River and Billingsgate Lights 
also had been extinguished. 

Our host said that the frost, too, on the windows 
caused him much trouble, and in sultry summer nights 
the moths covered them and dimmed his lights ; some- 
times even small birds flew against the thick plate glass, 
and were found on the ground beneath in the morning 
with their necks broken. In the spring of 1855 he 
found nineteen small yellowbirds, perhaps goldfinches 
or myrtle-birds, thus lying dead around the light-house ; 
and sometimes in the fall he had seen where a golden 
plover had struck the glass in the night, and left the 
down and the fatty part of its breast on it. 

Thus he struggled, by every method, to keep his light 
shining before men. Surely the hght-house keeper has 
a responsible, if an easy, office. When his lamp goes 
out, he goes out ; or, at most, only one such accident is 
pardoned. 

I thought it a pity that some poor student did not live 
there, to profit by all that light, since he would not rob 
the mariner. " Well," he said, " I do sometimes come 
up here and read the newspaper when they are noisy 
down below\" Think of fifteen argand lamps to read 
the newspaper by ! Government oil ! — light, enough, 



158 CAPE COD. 

perchance, to read the Constitution by ! I thought that 
he should read nothing less than his Bible by that light. 
I had a classmate who fitted for college by the lamps 
of a light-house, which was more light, we think, than 
the University afforded. 

When we had come down and walked a dozen rods 
from the light-house, we found that we could not get the 
full strength of its light on the narrow strip of land 
between it and the shore, being too low for the focus, 
and we saw only so many feeble and rayless stars ; but 
at forty rods inland we could see to read, thoiagh we 
were still indebted to only one lamp. Each reflector 
sent forth a separate " fan " of light, — one shone on the 
windmill, and one in the hollow, while the intervening 
spaces were in shadow. This light is said to be visible 
twenty nautical miles and more, from an observer fifteen 
feet above the level of the sea. We could see the 
revolving light at Race Point, the end of the Cape, 
about nine miles distant, and also the light on Long 
Point, at the entrance of Provincetown Harbor, and 
one of the distant Plymouth Harbor Lights, across the 
Bay, nearly in a range with the last, like a star in the 
horizon. The keeper thought that the other Plymouth 
Light was concealed by being exactly in a range with 
the Long Point Light. He told us that the mariner 
was sometimes led astray by a mackerel fisher's lantern, 
who was afraid of being run down in the night, or even 
by a cottager's light, mistaking them for some well-known 
light on the coast, and, when he discovered his mistake, 
was wont to curse the prudent fisher or the wakeful cot- 
tager without reason. 

Though it was once declared that Providence placed 
this mass of clay here on purpose to erect a light-house 



THE HIGHLAND LIGHT. 159 

on, the keeper said that the h'ght-house should have been 
erected half a mile farther south, where the coast begins 
to bend, and where the light could be seen at the same 
time with the Nauset Lights, and distinguished from 
them. They now talk of building one there. It hap- 
pens that the present one is the more useless now, so 
near the extremity of the Cape, because other light- 
houses have since been erected there. 

Among the many regulations of the Light-house 
Board, hanging against the wall here, many of them 
excellent, perhaps, if there were a regiment stationed 
here to attend to them, there is one requiring the 
keeper to keep an account of the number of vessels 
which pass his light during the day. But there are a 
hundred vessels in sight at once, steering in all direc- 
tions, many on the very verge of the horizon, and he 
must have more eyes than Argus, and be a good deal 
farther-sighted, to tell which are passing his light. It 
is an employment in some respects best suited to the 
habits of the gulls which coast up and down here, and 
circle over the sea. 

I was told by the next keeper, that on the 8th of 
June following, a particularly clear and beautiful morn- 
ing, he rose about half an hour before sunrise, and 
having a little time to spare, for his custom was to 
extinguish his lights at sunrise, walked down toward 
the shore to see what he might find. When he got to 
the edge of the bank he looked up, and, to his astonish- 
ment, saw the sun rising, and already part way above 
the horizon. Thinking that his clock was wrong, he 
made haste back, and though it was still too early by the 
clock, extinguished his lamps, and when he had got 
through and come down, he looked out the window, and, 



160 CAPE COD. 

to his still greater astonishment, saw the sun just where 
it was before, two thirds above the horizon. He showed 
me where its rajs fell on the wall across the room. He 
proceeded to make a fire, and when he had done, there 
was the sun still at the same height. Whereupon, not 
trusting to his own eyes any longer, he called up his 
wife to look at it, and she saw it also. There were ves- 
sels in sight on the ocean, and their crews, too, he said, 
must have seen it, for its rays fell on them. It remained 
at that height for about fifteen minutes by the clock, and 
then rose as usual, and nothing else extraordinary hap- 
pened during that day. Though accustomed to the 
coast, he had never witnessed nor heard of such a phe- 
nomenon before. I suggested that there might have 
been a cloud in the horizon invisible to him, whicli rose 
with the sun, and his clock was only as accurate as the 
average ; or perhaps, as he denied the possibility of 
this, it was such a looming of the sun as is said to occur 
at Lake Superior and elsewhere. Sir John Frankhu, 
for instance, says in his Narrative, that when he was on 
the shore of the Polar Sea, the horizontal refraction 
varied so much one morning that " the upper limb of 
the sun twice appeared at the horizon before it finally 
rose." 

He certainly must be a sun of Aurora to whom the 
sun looms, when there are so many millions to whom 
it glooms rather, or who never see it till an hour after 
it has risen. But it behooves us old stagers to keep our 
lamps trimmed and burning to the last, and not trust to 
the sun's looming. 

This keeper remarked that the centre of the flame 
should be exactly opposite the centre of the reflectors, 
and that accordingly, if he was not careful to turn down 



THE HIGHLAND LIGHT. 161 

his wicks in the morning, the sun falling on the reflec- 
tors on the south side of the building would set fire to 
them, like a burning-glass, in the coldest day, and he 
would look up at noon and see them all lighted ! When 
your lamp is ready to give hght, it is readiest to receive 
it, and the sun will hght it. His successor said that he 
had never known them to blaze in such a case, but 
merely to smoke. 

I saw that this was a place of wonders. In a sea 
turn or shallow fog while I was there the next sum- 
mer, it being clear overhead, the edge of the bank 
twenty rods distant appeared like a mountain pasture in 
the horizon. I was completely deceived by it, and I 
could then understand why mariners sometimes ran 
ashore in such cases, especially in the night, supposing 
it to be far away, though they could see the land. Once 
since this, being in a large oyster boat two or three hun- 
dred miles from here, in a dark night, when there was a 
thin veil of mist on land and water, we came so near to 
running on to the land before our skipper was aware of it, 
that the first warning was my hearing the sound of the 
surf under my elbow. I could almost have jumped 
a.shore, and we were obliged to go about very suddenly 
to prevent striking. The distant light for which we 
were steering, supposing it a light-house five or six 
miles off, came through the cracks of a fisherman's 
bunk not more than six rods distant. 

The keeper entertained us handsomely in his solitary 
little ocean house. He was a man of singular patience 
and intelligence, who, when our queries struck him, 
rung as clear as a bell in response. The light-house 
lamps a few feet distant shone full into my chamber, and 
made it as bright as day, so I knew exactly how the 



162 CAPE COD. 

Highland Light bore all that night, and I was in no 
danger of being wrecked. Unlike the last, this was as 
still as a summer night. I thought as I lay there, half 
awake and half asleep, looking upward through the win- 
dow at the lights above my head, how many sleepless 
eyes from far out on the Ocean stream — mariners of all 
nations spinning their yarns through the various watches 
of the night — were directed toward my couch. 



IX. 

THE SEA AND THE DESERT. 



The light-house lamps were still burning, though now 
with a silvery lustre, when I rose to see the sun come 
out of the Ocean ; for he still rose eastward of us ; but I 
was convinced that he must have come out of a dry bed 
beyond that stream, though he seemed to come out of the 

water. 

" The sun once more touched the fields, 
Mounting to heaven from the fair flowing 
Deep-running Ocean." 

Now we saw countless sails of mackerel fishers abroad 
on the deep, one fleet in the north just pouring round the 
Cape, another standing down toward Chatham, and our 
host's son went off to join some lagging member of the 
first which had not yet left the Bay. 

Before we left the liprht-house we were obliored to 
anoint our shoes faithfully with tallow, for walking on the 
beach, in the salt water and the sand, had turned them 
red and crisp. To counterbalance this, I have remarked 
that the sea-shore, even where muddy, as it is not here, is 
singularly clean ; for notwithstanding the spattering of the 
water and mud and squirting of the clams while walking 
to and from the boat, your best black pants retain no 
stain nor dirt, such as they would acquire from walking 
in the country. 



164 CAPE COD. 

We have heard that a few days after this, when the 
Province town Bank was robbed, speedy emissaries from 
Provincetown made particular inquiries concerning us 
at this light-house. Indeed, they traced us all the way 
down the Cape, and concluded that we came by this un- 
usual route down the back side and on foot, in order that 
we might discover a way to get off with our booty when 
we had committed the robbery. The Cape is so long 
and narrow, and so bare withal, that it is wellnigh im- 
possible for a stranger to visit it without the knowledge 
of its inhabitants generally, unless he is wrecked on to 
it in the night. So, when this robbery occurred, all their 
suspicions seem to have at once centred on us two 
travellers who had just passed down it. If we had not 
chanced to leave the Cape so soon, we sholild probably 
have been aiTested. The real robbers were two young 
men from Worcester County who travelled with a centre- 
bit, and are said to have done their work very neatly. 
But the only bank that we pried into was the great Cape 
Cod sand-bank, and we robbed it only of an old French 
crown piece, some shells and pebbles, and the materials 
of this story. 

Again we took to the beach for another day (October 
13), walking along the shore of the resounding sea, de- 
termined to get it into us. We wished to associate with 
the Ocean until it lost the pond-like look which it wears to 
a countryman. We still thought that we could see the 
other side. Its surface was still more sparkling than the 
day before, and we beheld " the countless smilings of 
the ocean waves " ; though some of them were pretty 
broad grins, for still the wind blew and the billows broke 
in foam along the beach. The nearest beach to us on 
the other side, whither we looked, due east, was on the 



THE SEA AND THE DESERT. 165 

coast of Galicia, in Spain, whose capital is Santiago, 
though by old poets' reckoning it should have been At- 
lantis or the Hesperides ; but heaven is found to be far- 
ther west now. At first we were abreast of that part of 
Portugal entre Douro e 3Iino, and then Galicia and the 
port of Pontevedra opened to us as we walked along ; 
but w^e did not enter, the breakers ran so high. The 
bold headland of Cape Finisterre, a little north of east, 
jutted toward us next, with its vain brag, for we flung 
back, — " Here is Cape Cod, — Cape Land's-Beginning." 
A little indentation toward the north, — for the land 
loomed to our imaginations by a common mirage, — we 
knew was the Bay of Biscay, and w^e sang : 

" There we lay, till next day, 

In the Bay of Biscay ! " 

A little south of east was Palos, where Columbus 
weighed anchor, and farther yet the pillars which Her- 
cules set up ; concerning which when we inquired at the 
top of our voices what was written on them, — for we 
had the morning sun in our faces, and could not see dis- 
tinctly, — the inhabitants shouted Ne plus ultra (no 
more beyond), but the wind bore to us the truth only, 
plus ultra (more beyond), and over the Bay westward 
was echoed ultra (beyond). We spoke to them through 
the surf about the Far West, the true Hesperia, ew iripas 
or end of the day, the This Side Sundown, where the 
sun was extinguished in the Pacific^ and we advised 
them to pull up stakes and plant those pillars of theirs 
on the shore of California, whither all our folks were 
gone, — the only ne plus ultra now. Whereat they 
looked crestfallen on their cliffs, for we had taken the 
wind out of all their sails. • 



166 CAPE COD. 

We could not perceive that any of their leavings 
washed up here, though we picked up a child's toy, a 
small dismantled boat, which may have been lost at 
Pontevedra. 

The Cape became narrower and naiTower as we ap- 
proached its wrist between Truro and Provincetovm, 
and the shore inclined more decidedly to the west. At 
the head of East Harbor Creek, the Atlantic is separated 
but by half a dozen rods of sand from the tide-waters of 
the Bay. From the Clay Pounds the bank flatted off 
for the last ten miles to the extremity at Race Point, 
though the highest parts, which are called " islands " 
from their appearance at a distance on the sea, were still 
seventy or eighty feet above the Atlantic, and afforded a 
good view of the latter, as well as a constant view of the 
Bay, there being no trees nor a hill sufficient to interrupt 
it. Also the sands began to invade the land more and 
more, until finally they had entire possession from sea to 
sea, at the narrowest part. For three or four miles 
between Truro and Provincetown there were no in- 
habitants from shore to shore, and there were but three 
or four houses for twice that distance. 

As we plodded along, either by the edge of the ocean, 
where the sand was rapidly drinking up the last wave 
that wet it, or over the sand-hills of the bank, the mack- 
erel fleet continued to pour round the Cape north of 
us, ten or fifteen miles distant, in countless numbers, 
schooner after schooner, till they made a city on the 
water. They were so thick that many appeared to be 
afoul of one another ; now all standing on this tack, 
now on that. We saw how well the New-Englanders 
had followed up Captain John Smith's suggestions with 
regard to the fisheries, made in 1616, — to what a pitch 



THE SEA AND THE DESERT. 1G7 

they had carried " this contemptible trade of fish," as he 
significantly styles it, and were now equal to the Hol- 
landers whose example he holds up for the Enghsh to 
emulate ; notwithstanding that " in this faculty," as he 
says, " the former are so naturalized, and of their vents so 
.certainly acquainted, as there is no hkelihood they will 
ever be paralleled, having two or three thousand busses, 
flat-bottoms, sword-pinks, todes, and such like, that breeds 
them pailors, mariners, soldiers, and merchants, never to 
be wrought out of that trade and fit for any other." We 
thought that it would take all these names and more to 
describe the numerous craft which we saw. Even then, 
some years before our " renowned sires " with their 
" peerless dames " stepped on Plymouth Rock, he wrote, 
" Newfoundland doth yearly freight neir eight hundred 
sail of ships with a silly, lean, skinny, poor-john, and cor 
fish," though all their supplies must be annually trans- 
ported from Europe. Why not plant a colony here 
then, and raise those supplies on the spot ? " Gf all the 
four parts of the world," says he, " that I have yet seen, 
not inhabited, could I have but means to transport a 
colony, I would rather live here than anywhere. -A.rid 
if it did not maintain itself, were we but once indiffer- 
ently well fitted, let us starve." Then " fishing before 
your doors," you " may every night sleep quietly ashore, 
with good cheer and what fires you will, or, when you 
please, with your wives and family." Already he an- 
ticipates " the new towns in New England in memory 
of their old," — and who knows what may be discovered 
in the " heart and entrails " of the land, " seeing even 
the very edges," &c., &c. 

All this has been accomplished, and more, and where 
is Holland now? Verily the Dutch have taken it. 



1G8 CAPE COD. 

There was no long interval between the suggestion of 
Smith and the eulogy of Burke. 

Still one after another the mackerel schooners hove in 
sight round the head of the Cape, " whitening all the sea 
road," and we watched each one for a moment with an 
undivided interest. It seemed a pretty sport. Here in 
the country it is only a few idle boys or loafers that go a- 
fishing on a rainy day ; but there it appeared as if every 
able-bodied man and helpful boy in the Bay had gone 
out on a pleasure excursion in their yachts, and all 
would at last land and have a chowder on the Cape. 
The gazetteer tells you gravely how many of the men 
and boys of these towns are engaged in the whale, cod, 
and mackerel fishery, how many go to the banks of New- 
foundland, or the coast of Labrador, the Straits of Belle 
Isle or the Bay of Chaleurs (Shalore the sailors call it) ; 
as if I were to reckon up the number of boys in Concord 
who are engaged during the summer in the perch, pick- 
erel, bream, horn-pout, and shiner fishery, of which no 
one keeps the statistics, — though I think that it is pur- 
sued with as much profit to the moral and intellectual 
man (or boy), and certainly with less danger to the phys- 
ical one. 

One of my playmates, who was apprenticed to a print- 
er, and was somewhat of a wag, asked his master one 
afternoon if he might go a-fishing, and his master con- 
sented. He was gone three months. When he came 
back, he said that he had been to the Grand Banks, and 
went to setting type again as if only an afternoon had 
intervened. 

I confess I was surprised to find that so many men 
spent their whole day, ay, their whole lives almost, 
a-fishinor. It is remarkable what a serious business men 



THE SEA AND THE DESERT. 169 

make of getting their dinners, and how universally shift- 
lessness and a grovelling taste take refuge in a merely 
ant-like industry. Better go without your dinner, I 
thought, than be thus everlastingly fishing for it like a 
cormorant. Of course, viewed from the shore, our pur- 
suits in the country appear not a whit less frivolous. 

I once sailed three miles on a mackerel cruise myself. 
It was a Sunday evening after a very warm day 
in which there had been frequent thunder-showers, 
and I had walked along the shore from Cohasset to 
Duxbury. I wished to get over from the last place to 
Clark's Island, but no boat could stir, they said, at that 
stage of the tide, they being left high on the mud. At 
length I learned that the tavern-keeper, Winsor, was 
going out mackerelling with seven men that evening, and 
would take me. When there had been due delay, we 
one after another straggled down to the shore in a 
leisurely manner, as if waiting for the tide still, and in 
India-rubber boots, or carrying our shoes in our hands, 
waded to the boats, each of the crew bearing an armful 
of wood, and one a bucket of new potatoes besides. 
Then they resolved that each should bring one more 
armful of wood, and that would be enough. They had 
already got a barrel of water, and had some more in the 
schooner. We shoved the boats a dozen rods over the 
mud and water till they floated, then rowing half a mile 
to the vessel climbed aboard, and there we were in a 
mackerel schooner, a fine stout vessel of forty-three tons, 
whose name I forget. The baits were not dry on the 
hooks. There was the mill in which they ground the 
mackerel, and the trough to hold it, and the long-handled 
dipper to cast it overboard with ; and already in the 
harbor we saw the surface rippled with schools of small 
8 



170 CAPE COD. 

mackerel, the real Scomher vernalis. The crew proceeded 
leisurely to weigh anchor and raise their two sails, there 
being a fair but very slight wind ; — and the sun now set- 
ting clear and shining on the vessel after the thunder- 
showers, I thought that I could not have commenced the 
voyage under more favorable auspices. They had four 
dories and commonly fished in them, else they fished on 
the starboard side aft where their lines hung ready, two 
to a man. The boom swung round once or twice, and 
Winsor cast overboard the foul juice of mackerel mixed 
with rain-water which remained in his trough, and then 
we gathered about the helmsman and told stories. I re- 
member that the compass was affected by iron in its 
neighborhood and varied a few degrees. There was one 
among us just returned from California, who was now 
going as passenger for his health and amusement. They 
expected to be gone about a week, to begin fishing the 
next morning, and to carry their fish fresh to Boston. 
They landed me at Clark's Island, where the Pilgrims 
landed, for my companions wished to get some milk for 
the voyage. But I had seen the whole of it. The rest 
was only going to sea and catching the mackerel. More- 
over, it was as well that I did not remain with them, con- 
sidering the small quantity of supplies they had taken. 

Now I saw the mackerel fleet on its fishing-ground^ 
though I was not at first aware of it. So my experi- 
ence was complete. 

It was even more cold and windy to-day than before, 
and we were frequently glad to take shelter behind a 
sand-hill. None of the elements were resting. On the 
beach there is a ceaseless activity, always something 
going on, in storm and in calm, winter and summer, 
night and day. Even the sedentary man here enjoys 



THE SEA AND THE DESERT. 171 

a breadth of view which is almost equivalent to motion. 
In clear weather the laziest may look across the Bay as 
far as Plymouth at a glance, or over the Atlantic as far 
as human vision reaches, merely raising his eyelids ; or 
if he is too lazy to look after all, he can hardly help 
hearing the ceaseless dash and roar of the breakers. 
The restless ocean may at any moment cast up a whale 
or a wrecked vessel at your feet. All the reporters in 
the world, the most rapid stenographers, could not report 
the news it brings. No creature could move slowly 
where there was so much life around. The few wreck- 
ers were either going or coming, and the ships and the 
sand-pipers, and the screaming gulls overhead ; nothing 
stood still but the shore. The little beach-birds trotted 
past close to the water's edge, or paused but an instant 
to swallow their food, keeping time with the elements. 
I wondered how they ever got used to the sea, that they 
ventured so near the waves. • Such tiny inhabitants the 
land brought forth ! except one fox. And what could 
a fox do, looking on the Atlantic from that high bank ? 
What is the sea to a fox ? Sometimes we met a wrecker 
with his cart and dog, — and his dog's faint bark at U3 
wayfarers, heard through the roaring of the surf, sounded 
ridiculously faint. To see a little trembhng dainty- 
footed cur stand on the margin of the ocean, and ineffec- 
tually bark at a beach-bird, amid the roar of the Atlan- 
tic ! Come with design to bark at a whale, perchance ! 
That sound will do for farmyards. All the dogs looked 
out of place there, naked and as if shuddering at the 
vastness ; and I thought that they would not have been 
there had it not been for the countenance of their mas- 
ters. Still less could you think of a cat bending her 
steps that way, and shaking her wet foot over the 



172 CAPE COD. 

Atlantic ; yet even this happens sometimes, they tell 
me. In summer I saw the tender young of the Piping 
Plover, like chickens just hatched, mere pinches of down 
on two legs, running in troops, with a faint peep, along 
the edge of the waves. I used to see packs of half-wild 
dogs haunting the lonely beach on the south shore of 
Staten Island, in New York Bay, for the sake of the 
carrion there cast up ; and I remember that once, when 
for a long time I had heard a furious barking in the tall 
grass of the marsh, a pack of half a dozen large dogs 
burst forth on to the beach, pursuing a little one which 
ran straight to me for protection, and I afforded it with 
some stones, though at some risk to myself; but the next 
day the little one was the first to bark at me. Under 
these circumstances I could not but remember the words 
of the poet: — 

" Blow, blow, thou winter wind 
Thou art not so unkind 

As his ingratitude; 
Thy tooth is not so keen, 
Because thou art not seen, 

Although thy breath be nide. 

" Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky, 
Tnou dost not bite so nigh 

As benefits forgot; 
Though thou the waters warp, 
Tlfy sting is not so sharp 

As friend remembered not." 

Sometimes, when I was approaching the carcass of 
a horse or ox which lay on the beach there, where there 
was no living creature in sight, a dog would unexpect- 
edly emerge from it and slink away with a mouthful 
of offal. 

The sea-shore is a sort of neutral ground, a most 



THE SEA AND THE DESERT. 173 

advantageous point from which to contemplate this 
world. It is even a trivial place. The waves for- 
ever rolling to the land are too far-travelled and un- 
tamable to be familiar. Creeping along the endless 
beach amid the sun-squawl and the foam, it occurs to 
us that we, too, are the product of sea-slime. 

It is a wild, rank place, and there is no flattery in 
it. Strewn with crabs, horse-shoes, and razor-clams, 
and whatever the sea casts up, — a vast morgue, where 
famished dogs may range in packs, and crows come 
daily to glean the pittance which the tide leaves them. 
The carcasses of men and beasts together lie stately 
up upon its shelf, rotting and bleaching in the sun and 
waves, and each tide turns them in their beds, and tucks 
fresh sand under them. There is naked Nature, — inhu- 
manly sincere, wasting no thought on man, nibbling at 
the cliffy shore where gulls wheel amid the spray. 

We saw this forenoon what, at a distance, looked like 
a bleached log with a branch still left on it. It proved 
to be one of the principal bones of a whale, whose car- 
cass, having been stripped of blubber at sea and cut 
adrift, had been washed up some months before. It 
chanced that this was the most conclusive evidence which 
we met with to prove, what the Copenhagen antiquaries 
assert, that these shores were the Furdustrandas, which 
Thorhall, the companion of Thorfinn during his expe- 
dition to Vinland in 1007, sailed past in disgust. It 
appears that after they had left the Cape and explored 
the country about Straum-Fiordr (Buzzards' Bay!), 
Thorhall, who was disappointed at not getting any wine 
to drink there, determined to sail north again in search 
of Vinland. Though the antiquaries have given us the 
original Icelandic, I prefer to quote their translation, 



174 CAPE COD. 

since theirs is the only Latin which I know to have been 
aimed at Cape Cod. 

" Cum parati erant, sublato 
velo, cecinit Thorhallus: 
E6 redeamus, ubi conterraiiei 
sunt nostri! faciamus aliter, 
expansi arenosi peritum, 
lata navis explorare curricula: 
dum procellam incitantes gladii 
morse impatientes, qui terram 
collaudant, Furdustrandas 
inhabitant et coquuut balaenas," 

In other words : " When they were ready and their sail 
hoisted, Thorhall sang: Let us return thither where 
our fellow-countrymen are. Let us make a bird * skil- 
ful to fly through the heaven of sand,t to explore the 
broad track of ships ; while warriors who impel to the 
tempest of swords,J who praise the land, inhabit Wonder- 
Strands, and cooh whales.'^ And so he sailed north past 
Cape Cod, as the antiquaries say, " and was shipwrecked 
on to Ireland." 

Though once there were more whales cast up here, 
I think that it was never more wild than now. We do 
not associate the idea of antiquity with the ocean, nor 
wonder how it looked a thousand years ago, as we do 
of the land, for it was equally wild and unfathomable 
always. The Indians have left no traces on its surface, 
but it is the same to the civilized man and the savage. 
The aspect of the shore only has changed. The ocean 
is a wilderness reaching round the globe, wilder than a 
Bengal jungle, and fuller of monsters, washing the very 
wharves of our cities and the gardens of our sea-side 

* I. e. a vessel. 

■^ The sea, which is arched over its sandy bottom like a heaveu. 

} Battle. • 



THE SEA AND THE DESERT. 175 

residences. Serpents, bears, hyenas, tigers, rapidly van- 
ish as civilization advances, but the most populous and 
civilized city cannot scare a shark far from its wharves. 
It is no further advanced than Singapore, with its tigers, 
in this respect. The Boston papers had never told me 
that there were seals in the harbor. I had always asso- 
ciated these with the Esquimaux and other outlandish 
people. Yet from the parlor windows all along the 
coast you may see families of them sporting on the flats. 
They were as strange to me as the merman would be. 
Ladies who never walk in the woods, sail over the sea. 
To go to sea ! "Why, it is to have the experience of 
Noah, — to reahze the deluge. Every vessel is an 
ark. 

We saw no fences as we walked the beach, no birchen 
riders, highest of rails, projecting into the sea to keep the 
cows from wading round, nothing to remind us that man 
was proprietor of the shore. Yet a Truro man did tell us 
that owners of land on the east side of that town were 
regarded as owning the beach, in order that they might 
have the control of it so far as to defend themselves 
against the encroachments of the sand and the beach- 
grass, — for even this friend is sometimes regarded as 
a foe ; but he said that this was not the case on the Bay 
side. Also I have seen in sheltered parts of the Bay 
temporary fences running to low-water mark, the posts 
being set in sills or sleepers placed transversely. 

After we had been walking many hours, the mackerel 
fleet still hovered in the northern horizon nearly in the 
same direction, but farther off, hull down. Though their 
sails were set they never sailed away, nor yet came to 
anchor, but stood on various tacks as close together as 
vessels in a haven, and we, in our ignorance, thought 



176 CAPE COD. 

that they were contending patiently with adverse winds, 
beating eastward ; but we learned afterward that they, 
were even then on their fishing-ground, and that they 
caught mackerel without taking in their mainsails or 
coming to anchor, "a smart breeze" (thence called a 
mackerel breeze) being," as one says, " considered most 
favorable" for this purpose. We counted about two 
hundred sail of mackerel fishers within one small arc 
of the horizon, and a nearly equal number had disap- 
peared southward. Thus they hovered about the ex- 
tremity of the Cape, like moths round a candle ; the 
lights at Race Point and Long Point being bright can- 
dles for them at night, — and at this distance they 
looked fair and white, as if they had not yet flown 
into the light, but nearer at hand afterward, we saw 
how some had formerly singed their wings and bodies. 

A village seems thus, where its able-bodied men are 
all ploughing the ocean together, as a common field. 
In North Truro the women and girls may sit at their 
doors, and see where their husbands and brothers are 
harvesting their mackerel fifteen or twenty miles off, 
on the sea, with hundreds of white harvest wagons, 
just as in the country the farmers' wives sometimes 
see their husbands working in a distant hill-side field. 
But the sound of no dinner-horn can reach the fisher's 
ear. 

Having passed the narrowest part of the waist of the 
Cape, though still in Truro, for this township is about 
twelve miles long on the shore, we crossed over to 
the Bay side, not half a mile distant, in order to spend 
the noon on the nearest shrubby sand-hill in Province- 
town, called Mount Ararat, which rises one hundred feet 
above the ocean. On our way thither we had occasion to 



THE SEA AND THE DESERT. 177 

admire the various beautiful forms and colors of the sand, 
and we noticed an interesting mirage, which I have 
since found that Hitchcock also observed on the sands 
of the Cape. We were crossing a shallow valley in 
the Desert, where the smooth and spotless sand sloped 
upward by a small angle to the horizon on every side, 
and at the lowest part was a long chain of clear but 
shallow pools. As we were approaching these for a 
drink in a diagonal direction across the valley, they 
appeared inclined at a slight but decided angle to the 
horizon, though they were plainly and broadly con- 
nected with one another, and there was not the least 
ripple ■ to suggest a current ; so that by the time we 
had reached a convenient part of one we seemed to 
have ascended- several feet. They appeared to lie by 
magic on the side of the vale, like a mirror left in a 
slanting position. It was a very pretty mirage for a 
Provincetown desert, but not amounting to what, in 
Sanscrit, is called " the thirst of the gazelle," as there 
was real water here for a base, and we were able to 
quench our thirst after all. 

Professor Rafn, of Copenhagen, thinks that the mi- 
rage which I noticed, but which an old inhabitant of 
Provincetown, to whom I mentioned it, had never seen 
nor heard of, had something to do with the name " Fur- 
dustrandas," i. e. Wonder-Strands, given, as I have said, 
in the old Icelandic account of Thorfinn's expedition 
to Vinland in the year 1007, to a part of the coast 
on which he landed. But these sands are more re- 
markable for their length than for their mirage, which 
is common to all deserts, and the reason for the name 
which the Northmen themselves give, — "because it 
took a long time to sail by them, " — is sufficient and 
8* !• 



178 CAPE COD. 

more applicable to these shores. However, if you should 
sail all the way from Greenland to Buzzard's Bay along 
the coast, you would get sight of a good many sandy 
beaches. But whether Thor-finn saw the mirage here 
or not, Thor-eau, one of the same family, did ; and per- 
chance it was because Lief the Lucky had, in a previous 
voyage, taken Thor-er and his people off the rock in the 
middle of the sea, that Thor-eau was born to see it. 

This was not the only mirage which I saw on the 
Cape. That half of the beach next the bank is com- 
monly level, or nearly so, while the other slopes down- 
ward to the water. As I was walking upon the edge 
of the bank in Wellfleet at sundown, it seemed to me 
that the inside half of the beach sloped upward toward 
the water to meet the other, forming *a rido:e ten or 
twelve feet high the whole length of the shore, but 
higher always opposite to where I stood ; and I was not 
convinced of the contrary till I descended the bank, 
though the shaded outlines left by the waves of a pre- 
vious tide but half-way down the apparent declivity 
might have taught me better. A stranger may easily 
detect what is strange to the oldest inhabitant, for the 
strange is his province. The old oysterman, speaking 
of gull-shooting, had said that you must aim under, 
when firing down the bank. 

A neighbor tells me that one August, looking through 
a glass from Naushon to some vessels which were sail- 
ing along near Martha's Vineyard, the water about them 
appeared perfectly smooth, so that they were reflected in 
it, and yet their full sails proved that it must be rippled, 
and they who were with him thought that it was a mi- 
rage, i. e. a reflection from a haze. 

From the above-mentioned sand-hill we overlooked 



THE SEA AND THE DESERT. 170 

Provincetown and its harbor, now emptied of vessels, 
and also a wide expanse of ocean. As we did not wish 
to enter Provincetown before night, though it was cold 
and windy, we returned across the Deserts to the Atlan- 
tic side, and walked along the beach again nearly to 
Pace Point, being still greedy of the sea influence. All 
the while it was not so calm as the reader may suppose, 
but it was blow, blow, blow, — "roar, roar, roar, — tramp, 
tramp, tramp, — without interruption. The shore now 
trended nearly east and west. 

Before sunset, having already seen the mackerel fleet 
returning into the Bay, we left the sea-shore on the north 
of Provincetown, and made our way across the Desert to 
the eastern extremity of the town. From the first high 
sand-hill, covered with beach-grass and bushes to its top, 
on the edge of the desert, we overlooked the shrubby 
hill and swamp country which surrounds Provincetown 
on the north, and protects it, in some measure, from the 
invading sand. Notwithstanding the universal barren- 
ness, and the contiguity of the desert, I never saw an 
autumnal landscape so beautifully painted as this was. 
It was like the richest rug imaginable spread over an 
uneven surface ; no damask nor velvet, nor Tyrian dye 
or stuffs, nor the work of any loom, could ever match it. 
There was the incredibly bright red of the Huckleberry, 
and the reddish brown of the Bayberry, mingled with 
the bright and living green of small Pitch-Pines, and also 
the duller green of the Bayberry, Boxberry, and Plum, 
the yellowish green of the Shrub Oaks, and the various 
golden and yellow and fawn colored tints of the Birch 
and Maple and Aspen, — each making its own figure, 
and, in the midst, the few yellow sand-slides on the sides 
of the hilb looked like the white floor seen through 



180 CAPE COD. 

rents in the rug. Coming from the country as I did, 
and many autumnal woods as I had seen, this was per- 
haps the most novel and remarkable sight that I saw on 
the Cape. Probably the brightness of the tints was en- 
hanced by contrast with the sand which surrounded this 
track. This was a part of the furniture of Cape Cod. 
"We had for days walked up the long and bleak piazza 
which runs along her Atlantic side, then over the sanded 
floor of her halls, and now we w^ere being introduced 
into her boudoir. The hundred white sails crowding 
round Long Point into Provincetown Harbor, seen over 
the painted hills in front, looked like toy ships upon a 
mantle-piece. 

The peculiarity of this autumnal landscape consisted 
in the lowness and thickness of the shrubbery, no less 
than in the brightness of the tints. It was like a thick 
stuff of worsted or a fleece, and looked as if a giant 
could take it up by the hem, or rather the tasselled fringe 
which trailed out on th« sand, and shake it, though it 
needed not to be shaken. But no doubt the dust would 
fly in that case, for not a little has accumulated under 
neath it. Was it not such an autumnal landscape ay 
this which suggested our high-colored rugs and carpets ? 
Hereafter when I look on a richer rug than usual, and 
study its figures, I shall think, there are the huckleberry 
hills, and there the denser swamps of boxberry and 
blueberry : there the shrub oak patches and the bay- 
berries, there the maples and the birches and the pines. 
What other dyes are to be compared to these ? They 
were warmer colors than I had associated with the New 
England coast. 

After threading a swamp full of boxberry, and climb- 
ing several hills covered with shrub-oaks, without a path, 



THE SEA AND THE DESERT. 181 

where shipwrecked men would be in danger of perish- 
ing in the night, we came down upon the eastern ex- 
tremity of the four planks which run the whole length 
of Provincetown street. This, which is the last town 
on the Cape, lies mainly in one street along the curving 
beach fronting the southeast. The sand-hills, covered 
with shrubbery and interposed with swamps and ponds, 
rose immediately behind it in the form of a crescent, 
which is from half a mile to a mile or more wide in the 
middle, and beyond these is the desert, which is the 
greater part of its territory, stretching to the sea on the 
east and west and north. The town is compactly built 
in the narrow space, from ten to fifty rods deep, between 
the harbor and the sand-hills, and contained at that time 
about twenty-six hundred inhabitants. The houses, in 
which a more modern and pretending style has at length 
prevailed over the fisherman's hut, stand on the inner or 
plank side of the street, and the fish and store houses, 
with the picturesque-looking windmills of the Salt-works, 
on the water side. The narrow portion of the beach 
between forming the street, about eighteen feet wide, the 
only one where one carriage could pass another, if there 
was more than one carriage in the town, looked much 
"heavier" than any portion of the "beach or the desert 
which we had walked on, it being above the reach of the 
highest tide, and the sand being lept loose by the occa- 
sional passage of a traveller. We learned that the four 
planks on which we were walking had been bought by the 
town's share of the Surplus Revenue, the disposition of 
which was a bone of contention between the inhabitants, 
till they wisely resolved thus to put it under foot. Yet 
some, it was said, were so provoked because they did not 
receive their particular share in money, that they per- 



182 CAPE COD. 

sisted in walking in the sand a long time after the side- 
walk was built. This is the only instance which I 
happen to know in which the surplus revenue proved a 
blessing to any town. A surplus revenue of dollars 
from the treasury to stem the greater evil of a surplus 
revenue of sand from the ocean. They expected to 
make a hard road by the time these planks were woni 
out. Indeed, they have already done so since we were 
there, and have almost forgotten their sandy baptism. 

As we passed along we observed the inhabitants en- 
gaged in curing either fish or the coarse salt hay which 
they had brought home and spread on the beach before 
their doors, looking as yellow as if they had raked it out 
of the sea. The front-yard plots appeared like what in- 
deed they were, portions of the beach fenced in, with 
Beach-grass growing in them, as if they were sometimes 
covered by the tide. You might still pick up shells and 
pebbles there. There were a few trees among the 
houses, especially silver abeles, willows, and balm-of- 
Gileads ; and one man showed me a young oak which he 
had transplanted from behind the town, thmking it an 
apple-tree. But every man to his trade. Though he 
had little woodcraft, he was not the less weatherwise, and 
gave us one piece of information ; viz. he had observed 
that when a thunder-cloud came up with a flood-tide it 
did not rain. This was the most completely maritime 
town that we were ever in. It was merely a good har- 
bor, surrounded by land dry, if not firm, — an inhabited 
beach, whereon fishermen cured and stored their fish, 
without any back country. When ashore the inhabitants 
still walk on planks. A few small patches have been 
reclaimed from the swamps, containing commonly half a 
dozen square rods only each. We saw one which was 



THE SEA AND THE DESERT. 183 

fenced with four lengths of rail ; also a fence made 
•wholly of hogshead-staves stuck in the ground. These, 
and such as these, were all the cultivated and cultiva- 
ble land in Provincetown. AYe were told that there 
were thirty or forty acres in all, but we did not discover 
a quarter part so much, and that was well dusted with 
sand, and looked as if the desert was claiming it. They 
are now turning some of their swamps into Cranberry 
Meadows on quite an extensive scale. 

Yet far from being out of the way, Provincetown is 
directly in the way of the navigator, and he is lucky who 
does not run afoul of it in the dark. It is situated on 
one of the highways of commerce, and men from all 
parts of the globe touch there in the course of a year. 

The mackerel fleet had nearly all got in before us, it 
being Saturday night, excepting that division which had^ 
8tood down towards Chatham in the morning ; and from 
a hill where we went to see the sun set in the Bay, wo 
counted two hundred goodly looking schooners at anchor 
in the harbor at various distances from the shore, and 
more were yet coming round the Cape. As each came 
to anchor, it took in sail and swung round in the wind, 
and lowered its boat. They belonged chiefly to Well- 
fleet, Truro, and Cape Ann. This was that city of 
canvas which we had seen hull down in the horizon. 
Near at hand, and under bare poles, they were unex- 
pectedly black-looking vessels, fieXaivai p^es. A fish- 
erman told us that there were fifteen hundred vessels in 
the mackerel fleet, and that he had counted three 
hundred and fifty in Provincetown Harbor at one time. 
Being obliged to anchor at a considerable distance from 
the shore on account of the shallowness of the water, 
they made the impression of a larger fleet than the ves- 



184 CAPE COD. 

sels at the wharves of a large city. As they had been 
manoeuvring out there all day seemingly for our enter- 
tainment, while we were walking northwestward along 
the Atlantic, so now we found them flocking into Prov- 
incetown Harbor at night, just as we arrived, as if to 
meet us, and exhibit themselves close at hand. Stand- 
ing by Race Point and Long Point with various speed, 
they reminded me of fowls coming home to roost. 

These were genuine New England vessels. It is 
stated in the Journal of Moses Prince, a brother of the 
annalist, under date of 1721, at which time he visited 
Gloucester, that the first vessel of the class called 
schooner was built at Gloucester about eight years before, 
by Andrew Robinson ; and late in the same century one 
Cotton Tufts gives us the tradition with some particulars, 
which he learned on a visit to the same place. Accord- 
ing to the latter, Robinson having constructed a vessel 
which he masted and rigged in a peculiar manner, on her 
going off the stocks a by-stander cried out, " 0, how she 
scoons I " w^hereat Robinson replied, " A schooner let 
her he 1 " " From which time," says Tufts, " vessels 
thus masted and rigged have gone by the name of 
schooners ; before which, vessels of this description were 
not known in Europe." (See Mass. Hist. Coll., Vol. 
IX., 1st Series, and Vol. I., 4th Series.) Yet I can 
hardly believe this, for a schooner has always seemed to 
me — the typical vessel. 

According to C. E. Potter of Manchester, New 
Hampshire, the very word schooner is of New England 
origin, being from the Indian schoon or scoot, meaning to 
rush, as Schoodic, from scoot and anke, a place where 
water rushes. N. B. Somebody of Gloucester was to 
read a paper on this matter before a genealogical society, 



THE SEA AND THE DESERT. 185 

in Boston, March 3, 1859, according to the Boston Jour- 
nal, q. V. 

Nearly all who come out must walk on the four 
planks which I have mentioned, so that you are pretty 
sure to meet all the inhabitants of Provincetown who 
come out in the course of a day, provided you keep out 
yourself. This evening the planks were crowded with 
mackerel fishers, to whom we gave and from whom we 
took the wall, as we returned to our hotel. This hotel 
was kept by a tailor, his shop on the one side of the 
door, his hotel on the other, and his day seemed to be 
divided between carving meat and carving broadcloth. 

The next morning, though it was still more cold and 
blustering than the day before, we took to the Deserts 
again, for we spent our days wholly out of doors, in the 
sun when there was any, and in the wind which never 
failed. After threading the shrubby hill country at the 
southwest end of the town, west of the Shank-Painter 
Swamp, whose expressive name — for we understood 
it at first as a landsman naturally would — gave it im- 
portance in our eyes, we crossed the sands to the shore 
south of Race Point and three miles distant, and thence 
roamed round eastward through the desert to where we 
had left the sea the evening before. We travelled five 
or six miles after we got out there, on a curving line, 
and might have gone nine or ten, over vast platters of 
pure sand, from the midst of which we could not see a 
particle of vegetation, excepting the distant thin fields of 
Beach-grass, which crowned and made the ridges toward 
which the sand sloped upward on each side ; — all the 
while in the face of a cutting wind as cold as January ; 
indeed, we experienced no weather so cold as this for 
nearly two months afterward. This desert extends from 



186 CAPE COD. 

the extremity of the Cape, through Provincetown into 
Truro, and many a time as we were traversing it we 
were reminded of " Riley's Narrative " of his captivity 
in the sands of Arabia, notwithstanding the cold. Our 
eyes magnified the patches of Beach-grass into corn- 
fields in the horizon, and we probably exaggerated 
the height of the ridges on account of the mirage. 
I was pleased to learn afterward, from Kalm's Travels 
in North America, that the inhabitants of the Lower 
St. Lawrence call this grass ( Calamagrostis arenaria)^ 
and also Sea-lyme grass {Elymus arenarius), seigle de 
mer ; and he adds, " I have been assured that these plants 
grow in great plenty in Newfoundland, and on other 
North American shores ; the places covered with them 
looking, at a distance, like cornfields ; which might ex- 
plain the passage in our northern accounts [he wrote in 
1749] of the excellent wine land [ Vinland del goda^ 
Translator], which mentions that they had found whole 
fields of wheat growing wild." 

The Beach-grass is " two to four feet high, of a sea- 
green color," and it is said to be widely diffused over the 
world. In the Hebrides it is used for mats, pack-saddles, 
bags, hats, &c. ; paper has been made of it at Dorches- 
ter in this State, and cattle eat it when tender. It has 
heads somewhat like rye, from six inches to a foot in 
length, and it is propagated both by roots and seeds. 
To express its love for sand, some botanists have called 
it Psamma arenaria, which is the Greek for sand, quali- 
fied by the Latin for sandy, — or sandy sand. As it is 
blown about by the wind, while it is held fast by its 
roots, it describes myriad circles in the sand as accu- 
rately as if they were made by compasses. 

It was the dreariest scenery imaginable. The only 



THE SEA AND THE DESERT. 187 

animals which we saw on the sand at that time were 
spiders, which are to be found almost everywhere 
whether on snow or ice-water or sand, — and a venom- 
ous-looking, long, narrow worm, one of the myriapods, 
or thousand-legs. We were surprised to see spider- 
holes in that flowing sand with an edge as firm as that 
of a stoned well. 

In June this sand was scored with the tracks of turtles 
both large and small, which had been out in the night, 
leading to and from the swamps. I was told by a terrce 
Jilius who has a " farm " on the edge of the desert, and 
is familiar with the fame of Provincetown, that one man 
had caught twenty-five snapping-turtles there the pre- 
vious spring. His own method of catching them was 
to put a toad on a mackerel-hook and cast it into a pond, 
tying the line to a stump or stake on shore. Invariably 
the turtle when hooked crawled up the line to the stump, 
and was found waiting there by his captor, however long 
afterward. He also said that minks, muskrats, foxes, 
coons, and wild mice were found there, but no squirrels. 
"We heard of sea-turtle as large as a barrel being found 
on the beach and on East Harbor marsh, but whether 
they were native there, or had been lost out of some ves- 
sel, did not appear. Perhaps they were the Salt-water 
Terrapin, or else the Smooth Terrapin, found thus far 
north. Many toads were met with where there was 
nothing but sand and beach-grass. In Truro I had been 
surprised at the number of large light-colored toads 
everywhere hopping over the dry and sandy fields, their 
color corresponding to that of the sand. Snakes also are 
common on these pure sand beaches, and I have never 
been so much troubled by mosquitoes as in such localities. 
At the same season strawberries grew there abundantly 



188 CAPE COD. 

in the little hollows on the edge of the desert standing 
amid the beach-grass in the sand, and the fruit of the shad- 
bush or Amelanchier, which the inhabitants call Josh- 
pears (some think from juicy ?), is very abundant on the 
hills. I fell in with an obliging man who conducted me 
to the best locality for strawberries. He said that he 
would not have shown me the place if he had not seen 
that I was a stranger, and could not anticipate him another 
year ; I therefore feel bound in honor not to reveal it. 
When we came to a pond, he being the native did the 
honors and carried me over on his shoulders, like Sind- 
bad. One good turn deserves another, and if he ever 
comes our way I will do as much for him. 

In one place we saw numerous dead tops of trees 
projecting through the otherwise uninterrupted desert, 
where, as we afterward learned, thirty or forty years 
before a flourishing forest had stood, and now, as the 
trees were laid bare from year to year, the inhabitants 
cut off their tops for fuel. 

We saw nobody that day outside of the town ; it was 
too wintry for such as had seen the Back-side before, or 
for the greater number who never desire to see it, to 
venture out ; and we saw hardly a track to show that 
any had ever crossed this desert. Yet I was told that 
some are always out on the Back-side night and day in 
severe weather, looking for wrecks, in order that they 
may get the job of discharging the cargo, or the like, — 
and thus shipwrecked men are succored. But, generally 
speaking, the inhabitants rarely visit these sands. One 
who had lived in Provincetown thirty years told me 
that he had not been through to the north side within 
that time. Sometimes the natives themselves come 
near perishing by losing their way in snow-storms be- 
hind the town. , 



THE SEA AND THE DESERT. 189 

The wind was not a Sirocco or Simoon, such as we 
associate with the desert, but a New England north- 
easter, — and we sought shelter in vain under the sand- 
hills, for it blew all about them, rounding them into 
cones, and was sure to find us out on whichever side 
we sat. From time to time we lay down and drank 
at little pools in the sand, filled with pure fresh water, 
all that was left, probably, of a pond or swamp. The 
air was filled with dust like snow, and cutting sand 
which made the face tingle, and we saw what it must 
be to face it when the weather was drier, and, if possi- 
ble, windier still, — to face a migrating sand-bar in the 
air, which has picked up its duds and is off, — to be 
whipped with a cat, not o' nine-tails, but of a myriad 
of tails, and each one a sting to it. A Mr. Whitman, 
a former minister of Wellfleet, used to write to his in- 
land friends that the blowing sand scratched the win- 
dows so that he was obliged to have one new pane set 
every week, that he might see out. 

On the edge of the shrubby woods the sand had the 
appearance of an inundation which was overwhelming 
them, terminating in an abrupt bank many feet higher 
than the surface on which they stood, and having par- 
tially buried the outside trees. The moving sand-hills 
of England, called Dunes or Downs, to which these have 
been likened, are either formed of sand cast up by the 
sea, or of sand taken from the land itself in the first 
place by the wind, and driven still farther inward. It 
is here a tide of sand impelled by waves and wind, 
slowly flowing from the sea toward the town. The 
northeast winds are said to be the strongest, but the 
northwest to move most sand, because they are the 
driest. On the shore of the Bay of Biscay many vil- 



190 



CAPE COD. 



lages were formerly destroyed in this way. Some of 
the ridges of beach-grass which we saw were planted 
by government many years ago, to preserve the har- 
bor of Provincetown and the extremity of the Cape. 
I talked with some who had been employed in the plant- 
ing. In the " Description of the Eastern Coast," which 
I have already referred to, it is said: "Beach-grass 
during the spring and summer grows about two^'feet 
and a half. If surrounded by naked beach, the storms 
of autumn and winter heap up the sand on all sides, 
and cause it to rise nearly to the top of the plant. In 
the ensuing spring the grass sprouts anew; is again 
covered with sand in the winter; and thus a hiU or 
ridge continues to ascend as long as there is a sufficient 
base to support it, or till the circumscribing sand, being 
also covered with beach-grass, will no longer yield to the 
force of the winds." Sand-hills formed in this way are 
sometimes one hundred feet high and of every variety 
of form, like snow-drifts, or Arab tents, and are con- 
tinually shifting. The grass roots itself very firmly. 
When I endeavored to pull it up, it usually broke off- 
ten inches or a foot below the surface, at what had been 
the surface the year before, as appeared by the numer- 
ous offshoots there, it being a straight, hard, round 
shoot, showing by its length how much the saiid had 
accumulated the last year; and sometimes the dead 
stubs of a previous season were pulled up with it from 
still deeper in the sand, with their own more decayed 
shoot attached, — so that the age of a sand-hill, and its 
rate of increase for several years, is pretty accurately 
recorded in this way. 

Old Gerard, the English herbalist, says, p. 1250: "I 
find mention in Stowe's Chronicle, in Anno 1555, of a 



THE SEA AND THE DESERT. 191 

certain pulse or pease, as they term it, wherewith the poor 
people at that time, there being a great dearth, were 
miraculously helped : he thus mentions it. In the 
month of August (saith he), in Suffolke, at a place 
by the sea side all of hard stone and pibble, called in 
those parts a shelf, lying between the towns of Orford 
and Aldborough, where neither grew grass nor any 
earth was ever seen ; it chanced in this barren place 
suddenly to spring up without any tillage or sowing, 
great abundance of peason, whereof the poor gathered 
(as men judged) above one hundred quarters, yet re- 
mained some ripe and some blossoming, as many as ever 
there were before : to the which place rode the Bishop 
of Norwich and the Lord Willoughby, with others in 
great number, who found nothing but hard, rocky stone 
the space of three yards under the roots of these peason, 
which roots were great and long, and very sweet." He 
tells us also that Gesner learned from Dr. Cajus that 
there were enough there to supply thousands of men. 
He goes on to say that " they without doubt grew there 
many years before, but were not observed till hunger 
made them take notice of them, and quickened their 
invention, which commonly in our people is very dull, 
especially in finding out food of this nature. My wor- 
shipful friend Dr. Argent hath told me that many 
years ago he was in this place, and caused his man 
to pull , among the beach with his hands, and follow 
the roots so long until he got some equal in length 
unto his height, yet could come to no ends of them." 
Gerard never saw them, and is not certain what kind 
they were. 

In Dwight's Travels in New England it is stated that 
the inhabitants of Truro were formerly regularly warned 



192 CAPE COD. 

under the authority of law in the month of April yearly, 
to plant beach-grass, as elsewhere they are warned to 
repair the highways. They dug up the grass in bunches, 
which were afterward divided into several smaller ones, 
and set about three feet apart, in rows, so arranged as 
to break joints and obstruct the passage of the wind. It 
spread itself rapidly, the weight of the seeds when ripe 
bending the heads of the grass, and so dropping directly 
by its side and vegetating there. In this way, for in- 
stance, they built up again that part of the Cape be- 
tween Truro and Provincetown where the sea broke 
over in the last century. They have now a public road 
near there,' made by laying sods, which were full of 
roots, bottom upward and close together on the sand, 
double in the middle of the track, then spreading brush 
evenly over the sand on each side for half a dozen feet, 
planting beach-grass on the banks in regular rows, as 
above described, and sticking a fence of brush against 
the hollows. 

The attention of the general government was first 
attracted to the danger which threatened Cape Cod 
Harbor from the inroads of the sand, about thirty 
years ago, and commissioners were at that time ap- 
pointed by Massachusetts to examine the premises. 
They reported in June, 1825, that, owing to " the trees 
and brush having been cut down, and the beach-grass 
destroyed on the seaward side of the Cape, opposite the 
Harbor," the original surface of the ground had been 
broken up and removed by the wind toward the Har- 
bor, — during the previous fourteen years, — over an 
extent of " one half a mile in breadth, and about four 
and a half miles in length." — "The space where a few 
years since were some of the highest lands on the Cape, 



THE SEA AND THE DESERT. 193 

covered with trees and bushes," presenting " an exten- 
sive waste of undulating sand " ; — and that, during the 
previous twelve months, the sand " had approached the 
Harbor an average distance of fifty rods, for an extent 
of four and a half miles ! " and unless some measures 
were adopted to check its progress, it would in a few 
years destroy both the harbor and the town. They 
therefore recommended that beach-grass be set out on 
a curving line over a space ten rods wide and four and 
a half miles long, and that cattle, horses, and sheep be 
prohibited from going abroad, and the inhabitants from 
cutting the brush. 

I was told that about thirty thousand dollars in all had 
been appropriated to this object, though it was com- 
plained that a great part of it was spent foolishly, as the 
public money is wont to be. Some say that while the 
government is planting beach-grass behind the town for 
the protection of the harbor, the inhabitants are rolling 
the sand into the harbor in wheelbarrows, in order to 
make house-lots. The Patent-Office has recently im- 
ported the seed of this grass from Holland, and distrib- 
uted it over the country, but probably we have as much 
as the Hollanders. 

Thus Cape Cod is anchored to the heavens, as it 
■were, by a myriad little cables of beach-grass, and, if 
they should fail, would become a total wreck, and ere- 
long go to the bottom. Formerly, the cows were per- 
mitted to go at large, and they ate many strands of 
the cable by which the Cape is moored, and wellnigh 
set it adrift, as the bull did the boat which was moored 
with a grass rope ; but now they are not permitted to 
wander. 

A portion of Truro which has considerable taxable 
9 li 



194 CAPE COD. 

property on it has lately been added to Provincetown, 
and I was told by a Truro man that his townsmen 
talked of petitioning the legislature to set ofif the next 
mile of their territory also to Provincetown, in order 
that she might have her share of the lean as well as 
the fat, and take care of the road through it; for its 
whole value is literally to hold the Cape together, and 
even this it has not always done. But Provincetown 
strenuously declines the gift. 

The wind blowed so hard from the northeast, that, 
cold as it was, we resolved to see the breakers on the 
Atlantic side, whose din we had heard all the morning ; 
so we kept on eastward through the Desert, till we struck 
the shore again northeast of Provincetown, and exposed 
ourselves to the full force of the piercing blast. There 
are extensive shoals there over which the sea broke with 
great force. For half a mile from the shore it was one 
mass of white breakers, which, with the wind, made such 
a din that we could hardly hear ourselves speak. Of 
this part of the coast it is said : " A northeast storm, 
the most violent and fatal to seamen, as it is frequently 
accompanied with snow, blows directly on the land: a 
strong current sets along the shore : add to which that 
ships, during the operation of such a storm, endeavor 
to work northward, that they may get into the bay. 
Should they be unable to weather Race Point, the wind 
drives them on the shore, and a shipwreck is inevitable. 
Accordingly, the strand is everywhere covered with the 
fragments of vessels." But since the Highland Light 
was erected, this part of the coast is less dangerous, and 
it is said that more shipwrecks occur south of that light, 
where they were scarcely known before. 

This was the stormiest sea that we witnessed, — more 



THE SEA AND THE DESERT. 195 

tumultuous, my companion affirmed, than the rapids of 
Niagara, and, of course, on a far greater scale. It was 
the ocean in a gale, a clear, cold day, with only one sail 
in sight, which labored much, as if it were anxiously 
seeking a harbor. It was high tide when we reached 
the shore, and in one place, for a considerable distance, 
each wave dashed up so high that it was difficult to pass 
between it and the bank. Further south, where the 
bank was higher, it would have been dangerous to 
attempt it. A native of the Cape has told me, that 
many years ago, three boys, his playmates, having gone 
to this beach in Wellfleet to visit a wreck, when the sea 
receded ran down to the wreck, and when it came in 
ran before it to the bank, but the sea following fast 
at their heels, caused the bank to cave and bury them 
alive. 

It was the roaring sea, OdXaa-aa T]xr]€(r(ra, — • 

dfi(f)\ de T aKpai 
'Hioves ^oococriv, cpevyo^eprjs aXbs i'^co. 

And the summits of the bank 
Around resound, the sea being vomited forth. 

As we stood looking on this scene we were gradually 
convinced that fishing here and in a pond were not, in 
all respects, the same, and that he who waits for fair 
weather and a calm sea may never see the glancing skin 
of a mackerel, and get no nearer to a cod than the 
wooden emblem in the State-House. / 

Having lingered on the shore till we were wellnigh 
chilled to death by the wind, and were ready to take 
shelter in a Charity-house, we turned our weather-beaten 
faces toward Provincetown and the Bay again, having 
now more than doubled the Cape. 



X. 
PROVINCETOWN. 

Early the next morning I walked into a fish-house 
near our hotel, where three or four men were engaged 
in trundling out the pickled fish on barrows, and spread- 
ing them to dry. They told me that a vessel had lately 
come in from the Banks with forty-four thousand codfish. 
Timothy Dwight says that, just before he arrived at 
Provincetown, "a schooner came in from the Great 
Bank with fifty-six thousand fish, almost one thousand 
five hundred quintals, taken in a single voyage ; the 
main deck being, on her return, eight inches under water 
in calm weather." The cod in this fish-house, just out 
of the pickle, lay packed several feet deep, and three 
or four men stood on them in cowhide boots, pitching 
them on to the barrows with an instrument which had a 
single iron point. One young man, who chewed tobacco, 
spat on the fish repeatedly. Well, sir, thought I, when 
that older man sees you he will speak to you. But 
presently I saw the older man do the same thing. It re- 
minded me of the figs of Smyrna. " How long does it 
take to cure these fish ? " I asked. 

" Two good drying days, sir," was the answer. 

I walked across the street again into the hotel to break- 
fast, and mine host inquired if I would take " hashed fish 



PROVINCETOWN. 197 

or beans." I took beans, though thej never were a 
favorite dish of mine. I found next summer that this 
was still the only alternative proposed here, and the land- 
lord was still ringing the changes on these two words. 
In the former dish there was a remarkable proportion of 
fish. As you travel inland the potato predominates. 
It chanced that I did not taste fresh fish of any kind on 
the Cape, and I was assured that they were not so much 
used there as in the country. That is where they are 
cured, and where, sometimes, travellers are cured of eating 
them. No fresh meat was slaughtered in Provincetown, 
but the little that was used at the public houses was 
brought from Boston by the steamer. 

A great many of the houses here were surrounded by 
fish-flakes close up to the sills on all sides, with only a 
narrow passage two or three feet wide, to the front door ; 
so that instead of looking out into a flower or grass plot, 
you looked on to so many square rods of cod turned 
wrong side outwards. These parterres were said to be 
least like a flower-garden in a good drying day in mid- 
summer. There were flakes of every age and pattern, 
and some so rusty and overgrown with lichens that they 
looked as if they might have served the founders of the 
fishery here. Some had broken down under the weight 
of successive harvests. The principal employment of 
the inhabitants at this time seemed to be to trundle out 
their fish and spread them in the morning, and bring 
them in at night. I saw how many a loafer who chanced 
to be out early enough, got a job at wheeling out the fi^^h 
of his neighbor who was anxious to improve the whole 
of a fair day. Now then I knew where salt fish were 
caught. They were everywhere lying on their backs, 
their collar-bones standing out like the lapels of a man- 



198 CAPE COD. 

o'-war-man's jacket, and inviting all things to come and 
rest in their bosoms ; and all things, with a few exceptions, 
accepted the invitation. I think, by the way, that if you 
should wrap a large salt fish round a small boy, he would 
have a coat of such a fashion as I have seen many a one 
w^ear to muster. Salt fish were stacked up on the 
wharves, looking like corded wood, maple and yellow 
birch with the bark left on. I mistook them for this at 
first, and such in one sense they were, — fuel to maintain 
our vital fires, — an eastern wood which grew on the 
Grand Banks. Some were stacked in the form of huge 
flower-pots, being laid in small circles with the tails out- 
wards, each circle successively larger than the preceding 
until the pile was three or four feet high, when the cir- 
cles rapidly diminished, so as to form a conical roof. 
On the shores of New Brunswick this is covered with 
birch-bark, and stones are placed upon it, and being thus 
rendered impervious to the rain, it is left to season before 
being packed for exportation. 

It is rumored that in the fall the cows here are some- 
times fed on cod's heads ! The godlike part of the cod, 
w^hich, like the human head, is curiously and wonderfully 
made, forsooth has but little less brain in it, — coming 
to such an end ! to be craunched by cows ! I felt ray 
own skull crack from sympathy. What if the heads of 
men were to be cut off to feed the cows of a superior 
order of beings who inhabit the islands in the ether ? 
Away goes your fine brain, the house of thought and in- 
stinct, to swell the cud of a ruminant animal ! — How- 
ever, an inhabitant assured me that they did not make a 
practice of feeding cows on cod's heads ; the cows merely 
would eat them sometimes ; but I might live there all my 
days and never see it done. A cow wanting salt would 



PROVINCETOWN. 199 

also sometimes lick out all the soft part of a cod on the 
flakes. This he would have me believe was the foun- 
dation of this fish-storj. 

It has been a constant traveller's tale and perhaps 
slander, now for thousands of years, the Latins and 
Greeks have repeated it, that this or that nation feeds 
its cattle, or horses, or sheep, on fish, as may be seen in 
CElian and Pliny, but in the Journal of Nearchus, who 
was Alexander's admiral, and made a voyage from the 
Indus to the Euphrates three hundred and twenty six 
years before Christ, it is said that the inhabitants of a 
portion of the intermediate coast, whom he called 
Icthyophagi or Fish-eaters, not only ate fishes raw and 
also dried and pounded in a whale's vertebra for a mor- 
tar and made into a paste, but gave them to their cattle, 
there being no grass on the coast ; and several modern 
travellers, — Braybosa, Niebuhr, and others make the 
same report. Therefore in balancing the evidence I am 
still in doubt about the Provincetown cows. As for 
other domestic animals, Captain King in his continuation 
of Captain Cook's Journal in 1779, says of the dogs of 
Kamtschatka, " Their food in the winter consists entirely 
of the head, entrails, and backbones of salmon, which 
are put aside and dried for that purpose ; and with this 
diet they are fed but sparingly.^' (Cook's Journal, 
Vol. VII. p. 315.) 

As we are treating of fishy matters, let me insert 
what Pliny says, that " the commanders of the fleets of 
Alexander the Great have related that the Gedrosi, who 
dwell on the banks of the river Arabis, are in the habit 
of making the doors of their houses with the jaw-bones 
of fishes, and raftering the roofs with their bones." Strabo 
tells the same of the Ichthyophagi. " Hardouin ro- 



200 capp: cod. 

mark?, that the Basques of his day were in the habit of 
fencin']j their 2;ardens with the ribs of the whale, which 
sometimes exceeded twenty feet in length ; and Cuvier 
says, that at the pre.-ent time the jaw-bone of the whale 
is used in Norway for the purpose of making beams or 
posts for buildings." (Bohn's ed. trans, of Pliny, Vol. II. 
p. 361.) Herodotus says the inhabitants on Lake Pra- 
sias in Thrace (living on piles), " give fish for fodder to 
their horses and beasts of burden." 

Provincctown was aj>parently what is called a flourish- 
ing town. Some of the inhabitants asked me if I did 
not think that they appeared to be well off generally. I 
said that I did, and asked how many there were in the 
almshouse. "O, only one or two, infirm or idiotic," 
answered they. The outward aspect of the houses and 
shops frequently suggested a poverty which their interior 
comfort and even richness disproved. You might meet 
a lady daintily dressed in the Sabbath morning, wading 
in among the sand-hills, from church, where there ap- 
peared no house fit to receive her, yet no doubt the 
interior of the house answered to the exterior of the 
lady. As for the interior of the inhabitants I am still in 
the dark about it. I had a little intercourse with some 
whom I met in the street, and was often agreeably dis- 
appointed by discovering the intelligence of rough, and 
what would be considered unpromising specimens. Nay, 
I ventured to call on one citizen the next summer, 
by special invitation. I found him sitting in his front 
doorway, that Sabbath evening, prepared for me to come 
in unto him ; but unfortunately for his reputation for 
keeping open house, there was stretched across his gate- 
way a circular cobweb of the largest kind and quite en- 
tire. This looked so ominous that I actually turned 
aside and went in the back way. 



PROVINCETOWN. 201 

This Monday morning was beautifully mild and calm, 
both on land and water, promising us a smooth passage 
across the Bay, and the fishermen feared that it would 
not be so good a drying day as the cold and windy one 
which preceded it. There could hardly have been a 
greater contrast. This was the first of the Indian sum- 
mer days, though at a late hour in the morning we found 
the wells in the sand behind the town still covered with 
ice, which had formed in the night. What with wind 
and sun my most prominent feature fairly cast its slough. 
But I assure you it will take more than two good drying 
days to cure me of rambling. After making an excur- 
sion among the hills in the neighborhood of the Shank- 
Painter Swamp, and getting a little work done in its line, 
we took our seat upon the highest sand-hill overlooking 
the town, in mid air, on a long plank stretched across 
between two hillocks of sand, where some boys were en- 
deavoring in vain to fly their kite ; and there we 
remained the rest of that forenoon looking out over the 
placid harbor, and watching for the first appearanee of 
the steamer from Wellfleet, that we might be in readiness 
to go on board when we heard the whistle oflf Long 
Point. 

We got what we could out of the boys in the mean- 
while. Provincetown boys are of course all sailors and 
have sailors' eye^. When we were at the Highland 
Light the last summer, seven or eight miles from Prov- 
incetown Harbor, and wished to know one Sunday morn- 
ing if the Olata, a well-known yacht, had got in from 
Boston, so that we could return in her, a Provincetown 
boy about ten years old, who chanced to be at the tabic, 
remarked that she had. I asked him how he knew. 
« I just saw her come in," said he. When I expressed 
9* 



202 CAPE COD. 

surprise that he could distinguish her from other vessels 
so far, he said that there \v6re not so many of those 
two-topsail schooners about but that he could tell her. 
Palfrey said, in his oration at Barnstable, the duck does 
not take to the water with a surer instinct than the 
Barnstable boy. [He might have said the Cape Cod 
boy as well.] He leaps from his leading-strings into 
the shrouds, it is but a bound from the mother's lap 
to the masthead. He boxes the compass in his infant 
soliloquies. He can hand, reef, and steer by the time 
he flies a kite. 

This was the very, day one would have chosen to sit 
upon a hill overlooking sea and land, and muse there. 
The mackerel fleet was rapidly taking its departure, one 
scliooner after another, and standing round the Cape, 
like fowls leaving their roosts in the morning to disperse 
themselves in distant fields. The turtle-like sheds of the 
salt-works were crowded into every nook in the hills, 
immediately behind the town, and their now idle wind- 
mills lined the shore. It was worth the while to see by 
what coarse and simple chemistry this almost necessary 
of life is obtained, with the sun for journeyman, and a 
single apprentice to do the chores for a large establish- 
ment. It is a sort of tropical labor, pursued too in the 
sunniest season ; more interesting than gold or diamond- 
washing, which, I fancy, it somewhat resembles at a dis- 
tance. In the production of the necessaries of life Na- 
ture is ready enough to assist man. So at the potash 
works which I have seen at Hull, where they burn the 
stems of the kelp and boil the ashes. Verily, chemistry 
is not a splitting of hairs when you have got half a dozen 
raw Irishmen in the laboratory. It is said, that owing 
to the reflection of the sun from the sand-hills, and there 



PROVINCETOWN. 203 

being absolutely no fresh water emptying into the harbor, 
the same number of superficial feet yields more salt here 
than in any other part of the county. A little rain is 
considered necessary to clear the air, and make saU fast 
and good, for as paint does not dry, so water does not 
evaporate in dog-day weather. But they were now, as 
elsewhere on the Cape, breaking up their salt-works and 
selling them for lumber. 

From that elevation we could overlook the operations 
of the inhabitants almost as completely as if the roofs 
had been taken off. They were busily covering the 
wicker-worked flakes about their houses with salted fish, 
and we now sav/ that the back yards were improved for 
this purpose as much as the front ; where one man's fish 
ended another's began. In almost every yard we detected 
some little building from which these treasures were 
being trundled forth and systematically spread, and we 
saw that there was an art as well as a knack even in 
spreading fish, and that a division of labor was profit- 
ably practised. One man was withdrawing his fislies a 
few inches beyond the nose of his neighbor's cow wliich 
had stretched her neck over a paling to get at them. It 
seemed a quite domestic employment, like drying clothes, 
and indeed in some parts of the county the women take 
part in it. 

I noticed in several places on the Cape a sort of 
cloihes-Jiakes. They spread brush on the ground, and 
fence it round, and then lay their clothes on it, to keep 
them from the sand. This is a Cape Cod clothes-yard. 

The sand is the great enemy here. The tops of some 
of the hills were enclosed and a board put up forbidding 
all persons entering the enclosure, lest their feet should 
disturb the sand, and set it a-biowing or a-sliding. The 



204 CAPE COD. 

inhabitants are obliged to get leave from the authorities 
to cut wood behind the town for fish-flakes, bean-poles, 
pea-brush, and the like, though, as we were told, they 
may transplant trees from one part of the township to 
another without leave. Tlie sand drifts like snow, and 
sometimes the lower story of a house is concealed by it, 
though it is kept off by a wall. The houses were for- 
merly built on piles, in order that the driving sand might 
pass under them. We saw a few old ones here still 
standing on their piles, but they were boarded up now, 
being protected by their younger neighbors. There was 
a school-house, just under the hill on which we sat, filled 
with sand up to the tops of the desks, and of course the 
master and scholars had fled. Perhaps they had im- 
prudently left the windows open one day, or neglected to 
mend a broken pane. Yet in one place was advertised 
" Fine sand for sale here," — I could hardly believe my 
eyes, — probably some of the street sifted, — a good in- 
stance of the fact that a man confers a value on the most 
worthless thing by mixing himself with it, according to 
which rule we must have conferred a value on the whole 
backside of Cape Cod; — but I thought that if they 
could have advertised " Fat Soil," or perhaps " Fine 
sand got rid of," ay, and " Shoes emptied here," it would 
have been more alluring. As we looked down on the 
town, I thought that I saw one man, who probably lived 
beyond the extremity of the planking, steering and tack- 
ing for it in a sort of snow-shoes, but I may have been 
mistaken. In some pictures of Provincetown the per- 
sons of the inhabitants are not drawn below the ancles, 
so much being supposed to be buried in the sand. Nev- 
ertheless, natives of Provincetown assured me that they 
could walk in the middle of the road without trouble 



PflOMXCETOWN. 205 

even in slippers, for they had learned how to put their 
feet down and lift them up without taking in any sand. 
One man said that he should be surprised if he found 
half a dozen grains of sand in his pumps at night, and 
stated, moreover, that the young ladies had a dexterous 
way of emptying their shoes at each step, which it would 
take a stranger a long time to learn. The tires of the 
stage-wheels were about five inches wide ; and the wagon- 
tires generally on the Cape are an inch or two wider, 
as the sand is an inch or two deeper than elsewhere. I 
saw a baby's wagon with tires six inches wide to keep it 
near the surface. The more tired the wheels, the less 
tired the horses. Yet all the time that we were in Prov- 
incetown, which was two days and nights, we saw only 
one horse and cart, and they were conveying a coffin. 
They did not try such experiments there on common 
octasions. The next summer I saw only the two-wheeled 
horse-cart which conveyed me thirty rods into the harbor 
on my way to the steamer. Yet we read that there were 
two horses and two yoke of oxen here in 1791, and we 
were told that there were several more when we were 
there, beside the stage team. In Barber's Historical Col- 
lections, it is said, " so rarely are wheel-carriages seen in 
the place that they are a matter of some curiosity to the 
younger part of the community. A lad wlio understood 
navigating the ocean much better than land travel, on see- 
ing a man driving a wagon in the street, expressed his 
surprise at his being able to drive so straight without the 
assistance of a rudder." There was no rattle of carts, and 
there would have been no rattle if there had been any 
carts. Some saddle-horses that passed the hotel in the 
evening merely made the sand fly with a rustling sound 
like a writer sanding his paper copiously, but there was no 



206 CAPE COD. 

sound of their tread. No doubt there are more horses 
and carts there at present. A sleigh is never seen, or at 
least is a great novehy on the Cape, the snow being 
either absorbed by the sand or blown into drifts. 

Nevertheless, the inhabitants of the Cape generally 
do not complain of their " soil," but will tell you that 
it is good enough for them to dry their fish on. 

Notwithstanding all this sand, we counted three meet- 
ing-houses, and four school-houses nearly as large, on 
this street, though some had a tight board fence about 
them to preserve the plot within level and hard. Simi- 
lar fences, even within a foot of many of the houses, 
gave the town a less cheerful and hospitable appear- 
ance than it would otherwise have had. They told 
us that, on the whole, the sand had made no progress 
for the last ten years, the cows being no longer per- 
mitted to go at large, and every means being taken 
to stop the sandy tide. 

In 1727 Provincetown was "invested with peculiar 
privileges," for its encouragement. Once or twice it 
was nearly abandoned ; but now lots on the street fetch 
a high price, though titles to them were first obtained 
by possession and improvement, and they are still 
transferred by quitclaim deeds merely, the township 
being the property of the State. But though lots were 
so valuable on the street, you might in many places 
throw a stone over them to where a man could still 
obtain land or sand by squatting on or improving it. 

Stones are very rare on the Cape. I saw a very 
few small stones used for pavements and for bank 
walls, in one or two places in my walk, but they are 
60 scarce, that, as I was informed, vessels have been 
forbidden to take them from the beach for ballast, and 



PROVIXCETOWN. 207 

therefore their crews used to land at night and steal 
them. I did not hear of a rod of regular stone wall 
below Orleans. Yet I saw one man underpinning a 
new house in Eastham with some '* rocks," as he called 
them, which he said a neighbor had collected with great 
jiains in the course of years, and finally made over to 
bun. This I thought was a gift worthy of being re- 
corded, — equal to a transfer of California " rocks," 
almost. Another man who was assisting him, and who 
seemed to be a close observer of nature, hinted to me 
the locality of a rock in that neighborhood which was 
" forty-two paces in circumference and fifteen feet high," 
for he saw that I was a stranger, and, probably, would 
not carry it. off. Yet I suspect that the locality of the 
few large rocks on the forearm of the Caj^e is well 
known to the inhabitants generally. I even met with 
one man who had got a smattering of mineralogy, but 
where he picked it up I could not guess. I thought 
that he would meet with some interesting geological 
nuts for him to crack, if he should ever visit the main- 
land, Cohasset or Marblehead, for instance. 

The well stones at the Highland Light were brought 
from Hingham, but the wells and cellars of the Cape 
are generally built of brick, which also are imported. 
The cellars, as well as the wells, are made in a circular 
form, to prevent the sand from pressing in the wall. 
The former are only from nine to twelve feet in diam- 
eter, and are said to be very cheap, since a single tier 
of brick will suffice for a cellar of even larger dimen- 
sions. Of course, if you live in the sand, you will not 
require a large cellar to hold your roots. In Province- 
town, when formerly they suffered the sand to drive 
under their iiouses, obliterating all rudiment of a cellai', 



208 CAPE COD. 

they did not raise a vegetable to put into one. One 
f{\rraer in Wellfleet, who raised fifty bushels of potatoes, 
showed me his cellar under a corner of his house, not 
more than nine feet in diameter, looking like a cistern ; 
but he had another of the same size under his barn. 

You need dig only a few feet almost anywhere near 
the shore of the Cape to find fresh water. But that 
which we tasted was invariably poor, though the inhab- 
itants called it good, as if they were comparing it with 
salt water. In the account of Truro, it is said, " Wells 
dug near the shore are dry at low water, or ratlier at 
what is called young flood, but are replenished with the 
flowing of the tide," — the salt water, which is lowest 
in the sand, apparently forcing the fresh up. When 
you express your surprise at the greenness of a Prov- 
incetown garden on the beach, in a dry season, they will 
sometimes tell you that the tide forces the moisture up 
to them. It is an interesting fact that low sand-bars in 
the midst of the ocean, perhaps even those which are 
laid bare only at low tide, are reservoirs of fresh water 
at which the thirsty mariner can supply himself. They 
appear, like huge sponges, to hold the rain and dew 
which fall on them, and which, by capillary attrac- 
tion, are prevented from mingling with the surround- 
ing brine. 

The Harbor of Provincetown — which, as well as 
the greater part of the Bay, and a wide expanse of 
ocean, we overlooked from our perch — is deservedly 
famous. It opens to the south, is free from rocks, and 
is never frozen over. It is said that the only ice seen 
in it drifts in sometimes from Barnstable or Plymouth. 
D wight remarks that " The storms which prevail on the 
American coast generally come from the east ; and there 



PEOVINCETOWN. 209 

is no other harbor on a windward shore within two hun- 
dred miles." ♦ J. D. Graham, who has made a very 
minute and thorough survey of this harbor and the 
adjacent waters, states that " its capacity, depth of water, 
excellent anchorage, and the complete shelter it affords 
from all winds, combine to render it one of the most val- 
uable ship harbors on our coast." It is the harbor of the 
Cape and of the fishermen of Massachusetts generally. 
It was known to navigators several years at least before 
the settlement of Plymouth. In Captain John Smith's 
map of New England, dated 1614, it bears the name of 
Milford Haven, and Massachusetts Bay that of Stuard's 
Bay. His Highness, Prince Charles, changed the name 
of Cape Cod to Cape James ; but even princes have not 
always power to change a name for the worse, and as 
Cotton Mather said. Cape Cod is " a name which I sup- 
pose it will never lose till shoals of codfish be seen swim- 
mlnoj on its hi";hest hills." 

Many an early voyager was unexpectedly caught by 
this hook, and found himself embayed. On successive 
maps. Cape Cod appears sprinkled over with French, 
Dutch, and English names, as it made part of New 
France, New Holland, and New England. On one 
map Provincetown Harbor is called " Fuic (bownet ?) 
Bay," Barnstable Bay " Staten Bay," and the sea north 
of it " Mare del Noort," or the North Sea. On another, 
the extremity of the Cape is called " Staten Hoeck," or 
the States Hook. On another, by Young, this has 
Noord Zee, Staten hoeck or Hit hoeck, but the copy 
at Cambridge has no date ; the whole Cape is called 
" Niew Hollant " (after Hudson) ; and on another still, 
the shore between Race Point and Wood End ap- 
pears to be called >' Bevechier." In Champlain's admi- 



210 CAPE COD. 

rable Map of New France, including the oldest recog- 
nizable map of what is now the New England coast 
with which I am acquainted, Cape Cod is called G. 
Blan (i. e. Cape White), from the color of its sands, 
and Massachusetts Bay is Baye Blanche, It was vis- 
ited by De Monts and Champlain in 1605, and the next 
year was further explored by Poitrincourt and Cham- 
plain. The latter has given a particular account of these 
explorations in his "Voyages," together with separate 
charts and soundings of two of its harbors, — Malle 
Barre, the Bad Bar (Nauset Harbor.?), a name now 
applied to what the French called Cap Baturier, — and 
Port Fortune, apparently Chatham Harbor. Both these 
names are copied on the map of "Novi Belgii," in 
Ogilby's America. He also describes minutely the man- 
ners and customs of the savages, and represents by a 
plate the savages surprising the French and killing five 
or six of them. The French afterward killed some of 
the natives, and wished, by way of revenge, to carry 
off some and make them grind in their hand-mill at 
Port Royal. 

It is remarkable that there is not in English any ade- 
quate or correct account of the French exploration of 
what is now the coast of New England, between 1604 
and 1608, though it is conceded that they then made the 
first permanent European settlement on the continent 
of North America north of St. Augustine. If the lions 
had been the painters it would have been otherwise. 
This omission is probably to be accounted for partly by 
the fact that the early edition of Champlain's " Voyages " 
had not been consulted for this purpose. This contains 
by far the most particular, and, I think, the most inter- 
esting chapter of what we may call the Ante-Pilguim 



PEOVINCETOWN. 211 

history of New England, extending to one hundred and 
sixty pages quarto ; but appears to be unknown equally 
to the historian and the orator on Plymouth Rock. 
Bancroft does not mention Champlain at all among the 
authorities for De Monts' expedition, nor does he say 
that he ever visited the coast of New England. Though 
he bore the title of pilot to De Monts, he was, in an- 
other sense, the leading spirit, as well as the historian 
of the expedition. Holmes, Hildreth, and Barry, and 
apparently all our historians who mention Champlain, 
refer to the edition of 1632, in which all the separate 
charts of our harbors, &c., and about one half the narra- 
tive, are omitted ; for the author explored so many lands 
afterward that he could afford to forget a part of what 
he had done. Hildreth, speaking of De Monts's expe- 
dition, says that "he looked into the Penobscot [in 
1605], which Pring had discovered two years before," 
saying nothing about Champlain's extensive exploration 
of it for De Monts in 1604 (Holmes says 1608, and 
refers to Purchas) ; also that he followed in the track 
of Pring along the coast " to Cape Cod, which he 
called Malabarre." (Haliburton had made the same 
statement before him in 1829. He called it Cap 
Blanc, and Malle Barre (the Bad Btir) was the name 
given to a harbor on the east side of the Cape.) 
Pring says nothing about a river there. Belknap 
says that Weymouth discovered it in 1605. Sir F. 
Gorges says, in his narration (Maine Hist. Coll., Vol. 
II. p. 19), 1658, that Pring in 1606 "made a per- 
fect discovery of all the rivers and harbors." This 
is the most I can find. Bancroft makes Champlain to 
have discovered more western rivers in Maine, not 
naming the Penobscot ; he, however, must have been 



212 CAPE COD. 

the discoverer of distances on this river (see Belknap, 
p. 147). Pring was absent from England onlv about 
six months, and sailed by this part of Cape Cod (Male- 
barre) because it yielded no sassafras, while the French, 
who probably had not heard of Pring, were patiently 
for years exploring the coast in search of a place of set- 
tlement, sounding and surveying its harbors. 

John Smith's map, pubhshed in 1616, from observa- 
tions in 1614 — 15, is by many regarded as the oldest 
map of New England. It is the first that was made 
after this country was called New England, for he so 
called it; but in Champlain's "Voyages," edition 1613, 
(and Lescarbot, in 1612, quotes a still earlier account 
of his voyage,) there is a map of it made when it was 
known to Christendom as New France, called Carte 
Geographique de la Nouvelle Franse faictte par le Sieur 
de Champlain Saint Tongois Cappitaine ordinaire pour 
le roi en la Marine^ — faict ten 1612, from his obser- 
vations between 1604 and 1607 ; a map extending from 
Labrador to Cape Cod and westward to the Greai Lakes^ 
and crowded with information, geographical, ethnograph- 
ical, zoological, and botanical. He even gives the vari- 
ation of the compass as observed by himself at that date 
on many parts of the coast. This, taken together with 
the many separate charts of harbors and their soundings 
on a large scale, which this volume contains, — among 
the rest, Qui ni he quy (Kennebec), Chouacoit R. 
(Saco R.), Le Beau port, Port St. Louis (near Cape 
Ann), and others on our coast, — but which are not 
in the edition of 1632, makes this a completer map 
of the New England and adjacent northern coast than 
was made for half a century afterward, almost, we might 
be allowed to say, till another Frenchman, Des Barres, 



PROVINCETOWN. 213 

made another for us, which only our late Coast Survey 
has superseded. Most of the maps of this coast made 
for a long time after betray their indebtedness to Cham- 
plain. He was a skilful navigator, a man of science, and 
geographer to the King of France. He crossed the 
Atlantic about twenty times, and made nothing of it; 
often in a small vessel in which few would dare to go 
to sea to-day ; and on one occasion making the voyage 
from Tadoussac to St. Malo in eighteen days. He was 
in this neighborhood, that is, between Annapolis, Nova 
Scotia, and Cape Cod, observing the land and its inhab- 
itants, and making a map of the coast, from May, 1604, 
to September, 1607, or about three and a half years, and 
he has described minutely his method of surveying har- 
bors. By his own account, a part of his map was en- 
graved in 1604 (?). When Pont-Grav(5 and others 
returned to France in 1606, he remained at Port Royal 
with Poitrincourt, " in order," says he, " by the aid of 
God, to finish the chart of the coasts which I had 
begun " ; and again in his volume, printed before John 
Smith visited this part of America, he says : " It seems 
to me that I have done my duty as far as I could, if I 
have not forgotten to put in my said chart whatever 
I saw, and give a particular knowledge to the public 
of what had never been described nor discovered so 
particularly as I have done it, although some other may 
have heretofore written of it ; but it was a very small 
affair in comparison with what we have discovered 
within the last ten years." 

It is not generally remembered, if known, by the 
descendants of the Pilgrims, that when their forefathers 
were spending their first memorable winter in the New 
World, they had for neighbors a colony of French no 



214 CAPE COD. 

further off than Port Royal (Annapolis, Nova Scotia), 
three hundred miles distant (Prince seems to make it 
about five hundred miles) ; where, in spite of many 
vicissitudes, they had been for fifteen years. They 
built a grist-mill there as early as 1606; also made 
bricks and turpentine on a stream, WilHamson says, in 
1600. De Monts, who was a Protestant, brought his 
minister with him, who came to blows with the Catholic 
priest on the subject of religion. Though these founders 
of Acadie endured no less than the Pilgrims, and about 
the same proportion of them — thirty-five out of seventy- 
nine (Williamson's Maine says thirty-six out of sev- 
enty) — died the first winter at St. Croix, 1604-5, six- 
teen years earlier, no orator, to my knowledge, has ever 
celebrated their enterprise (WilHamson's History of 
Maine does considerably), while the trials which their 
successors and descendants endured at the hands of the 
English have furnished a theme for both the historian 
and poet. (See Bancroft's History and Longfellow's 
Evangeline.) The remains of their fort at St. Croix 
.were discovered at the end of the last century, and 
helped decide where the true St. Croix, our boundary, 
was. 

The very gravestones of those Frenchmen are prob- 
ably older than the oldest English monument in New 
England north of the EHzabeth Islands, or perhaps any- 
where in New England, for if there are any traces 
of Gosnold's storehouse left, his strong works are gone. 
Bancroft says, advisedly, in 1834, "It requires a believ- 
ing eye to discern the ruins of the fort " ; and that there 
were no ruins of a fort in 1837. Dr. Charles T. Jack- 
son tells me that, in the course of a geological survey 
in 1827, he discovered a gravestone, a slab of trap rock, 



PROVINCETOWN. 215 

on Goat Island, opposite Annapolis (Port Royal), in 
Nova Scotia, bearing a Masonic coat-of-arms "^nd the 
date 1606, which is fourteen years earlier than the 
landing of the Pilgrims. This was left in the possession 
of Judge Haliburton, of Nova Scotia. 

There were Jesuit priests in what has since been 
called New England, converting the savages at Mount 
Desert, then St. Savior, in 1613, — having come over 
to Port Royal in 1611, though they were almost imme- 
diately interrupted by the English, years before the 
Pilgrims came hither to enjoy their own religion. This 
according to Champlain. Charlevoix says the same ; and 
after coming from France in 1611, went west from Port 
Royal along the coast as far as the Kennebec in 1612, 
and was often carried from Port Royal to Moiint Desert. 

Indeed, the Englishman's history of New England com- 
mences, only when it ceases to be, New France. Though 
Cabot was the first to discover the continent of North 
America, Champlain, in the edition of his "Voyages" 
printed in 1632, after the English had for a season got 
possession of Quebec and Port Royal, complains with no 
little justice : " The common consent of all Europe is to 
represent New France as extending at least to the thirty- 
fifth and thirty-sixth degrees of latitude, as appears by 
the maps of the world printed in Spain, Italy, Holland, 
Flanders, Germany, and England, until they possessed 
themselves of the coasts of New France, where are 
Arcadie, the Etchemins (Maine and New Brunswick), 
the Almouchicois (Massachusetts ?), and the Great River 
St. Lawrence, where they have imposed, according to 
their fancy, such names as New England, Scotland, and 
others ; but it is not easy to efface the memory of a 
thing which is known to all Christendom." 



216 CAPE COD. 

That Cabot merely landed on the uninhabitable shore 
of Labrador, gave the English no just title to New 
England, or to the United States generally, any more 
than to Patagonia. His careful biographer (Biddle) 
is not certain in what voyage he ran down the coast 
of the United States, as is reported, and no one tells 
us what he saw. Miller, in the New York Hist. 
Coll., Vol. I. p. 28, says he does not appear to have 
landed anywhere. Contrast with this Verrazzani's tar- 
rying fifteen days at one place on the New England 
coast, and making frequent excursions into the interior 
thence. It chances that the latter's letter to Francis I., 
in 1524;~ contains "the earliest original account extant 
of the Atlantic coast of the United States " ; and even 
from that time the northern part of it began to be called 
La Terra Francese, or French Land. A part of it 
was called New Holland before it was called New Eng- 
land. The English were very backward to explore and 
settle the continent which they had stumbled upon. The 
French preceded them both in their attempts to colonize 
the continent of North America (Carolina and Florida, 
1562-4), and in their first permanent settlement (Port 
Royal, 1 605) ; and the right of possession, naturally 
enough, was the one which Eiigland mainly respected 
and recognized in the case of Spain, of Portugal, and 
also of France, from the time of Henry VIL 

The explorations of the French gave to the world the 
first valuable maps of these coasts. Denys of Honfleur 
made a map of the Gulf of St. Lawrence in 1506. No 
sooner had Cartier explored the St. Lawrence in 1535, 
than there began to be published by his countrymen re- 
markably accurate charts of that river as far up as Mon- 
treal. It is almost all of the continent north of Florida 



PROVINCETOWN. 217 

that you recognize on cLarts for more than a generation 
afterward, — though Verrazzani's rude plot (made under 
French auspices) was regarded by Hackluyt, more 
than fifty years after his voyage (in 1524), as the 
most accurate representation of our coast. The French 
trail is distinct. They went measuring and sounding, 
and when they got home had something to show for 
their voyages and explorations. There was no danger 
of their charts being lost, as Cabot's have been. 

The most distinguished navigators of that day were 
Italians, or of Italian descent, and Portuguese. The 
French and Spaniards, tliough less advanced in the 
science of navigation than the former, possessed more 
imagination and spirit of adventure than the English, 
and were better fitted to be the explorers of a new con- 
tinent even as late as 1751, 

This spirit it was which so early carried the French 
to the Great Lakes and the Mississi[)pi on the north, and 
the Spaniard to the same river on the south. It was 
long before our frontiers reached their settlements in the 
west, and a voyageur or coureur de bois is still our con- 
ductor there. Prairie is a French word, as Sierra is 
a Spanish one. Augustine in Florida, and Santa Fe 
in New Mexico [1582], both built by the Spaniards, 
are considered the oldest towns in the United States. 
Within the memory of the oldest man, the Anglo- 
Americans were confined between the Apalachian 
Mountains and the sea, "a space not two hundred 
miles broad," while the Mississippi was by treaty the 
eastern boundary of New France. (See the pamphlet 
on sjtthng the Ohio, London, 1763, bound up with the 
travels of Sir John Bartrara.) So far as inland discov- 
ery was concerned, the adventurous spirit of the English 
10 



218 CAPE COD. 

Tvas that of sailors who land but for a daj, and their en- 
terprise the enterprise of traders. Cabot spoke like an 
Englishman, as he was, if he said, as one reports, in 
reference to the discovery of the American Continent, 
when he found it running toward the north, that it was 
a great disappointment to him, being in his way to 
India ; but we would rather add to than detract from 
the fame of so great a discoverer. 

Samuel Penhallow, in his History (Boston, 1726), 
p. 51, speaking of " Port Royal and Nova Scotia," says 
of the last, that its " first seizure was by Sir Sebastian 
Cobbet for the crown of Great Britain, in the reign 
of King Henry VII.; but lay dormant till the year 
1621," when Sir William Alexander got a patent of it, 
and possessed it some years ; and afterward Sir David 
Kirk was proprietor of it, but erelong, "to the surprise 
of all thinking men, it was given up unto the French." 

Even as late as 1633 we find Winthrop, the first 
Governor of the Massachusetts Colony, who was not the 
most likely to be misinformed, who, moreover, has the 
fame, at least, of having discovered Wachusett Moun- 
tain (discerned it forty miles inland), talking about the 
" Great Lake " and the " hideous swamps about it," near 
which the Connecticut and the " Potomack " took their 
rise ; and among the memorable events of the year 
1642 he chronicles Darby Field, an Irishman's expe- 
dition to the " White hill," from whose top he saw east- 
ward what he "judged to be the Gulf of Canada," and 
westward what he "judged to be the great lake which 
Canada River comes out of," and where he found much 
"Muscovy glass," "and "could rive out pieces of forty 
feet long and seven or eight broad." While the very 
inhabitants of New England were thus fabling about the 



PEOVINCETOWN. 219 

country a hundred miles inland, which was a terra incog- 
nita to them, — or rather many years before the earliest 
date referred to, — Champlain, ihQ first Governor of Can- 
ada, not to mention the inland discoveries of Cartier,* 
Roberval, and others, of the preceding century, and his 
own earlier voyage, had already gone to war against 
the Iroquois in their forest forts, and penetrated to the 
Great Lakes and wintered there, before a Pilgrim had 
heard of New England. In Champlain's "Voyages," 
printed in 1613, there is a plate representing a fight in 
which he aided the Canada Indians against the Iroquois, 
near the south end of Lake Champlain, in July, 1G09, 
eleven years before the. settlement of Plymouth. Ban- 
croft says he joined the Algonquins in an expedition 
against the Iroquois, or Five Nations, in the northwest 
of New York. This is that " Great Lake," which the 
English, hearing some rumor of from the French, long 
after, locate in an " Imaginary Province called Laconia, 
and spent several years about 1630 in the vain attempt 
to discover." (Sir Ferdinand Gorges, in Maine Hist. 
Coll., Vol. II. p. 68.) Thomas Morton has a chapter on 
this " Great Lake." In the edition of Champlain's map 
dated 1632, the Falls of Niagara appear; and in a great 
lake northwest of Mer Douce (Lake Huron) there is an 
island represented, over which is written, ^^ Isle ou il 
y a une mine de cuivre" — ^ "Island where there is a 

* It is remarkable that the first, if not the only, part of New Eng- 
land which Cartier saw was Vermont (he also saw the mountains 
of New York), from Montreal Mountain, in 1535, sixty-seven years 
before Gosnold saw Cape Cod. If seeing is discovering, — and that 
is all that it is proved that Cabot knew of the coast of the United 
States, — then Cartier (to omit Verrazzani and Gomez) was the dis- 
coverer of New England rather than Gosnold, who is commonly 
BO styled. 



220 CAPE COD. 

mine of copper." This will do for an offset to our Gov- 
ernor's " Muscovy Glass." Of all these adventures and 
discoveries we have a minute and faithful account, giv- 
ing facts and dates as well as charts and soundings, all 
scientific and Frenchman-like, with scarcely one fable 
or traveller's story. 

Probably Cape Cod was visited by Europeans long 
before the seventeenth century. It may be that Cabot 
himself beheld it. Verrazzani, in 1524, according to his 
own account, spent fifteen days on our coast, in latitude 
41° 40', (some suppose in the harbor of Newport,) and 
often went five or six leagues into the interior there, and 
he says that he sailed thence at once one hundred and 
fifty leagues northeasterly, always in sight of the coast. 
Tbere is a chart in Hackluyt's " Divers Voyages," made 
according to Verrazzani's plot, which last is praised for 
its accuracy by Hackluyt, but I cannot distinguish Cape 
Cod on it, unless it is the " C. Arenas," which is in the 
right latitude, though ten degrees west of " Claudia," 
which is thought to be Block Island. 

The " Biographic Universelle " informs us that " An 
ancient manuscript chart drawn in 1529 by Diego Ri- 
beiro, a Spanish cosmographer, has preserved the mem- 
ory of the voyage of Gomez [a Portuguese sent out 
by Charles the Fifth]. One reads in it under (au 
dessous) the place occupied by the States of New York, 
Connecticut, and Rhode Island, Te7're d'Etienjie Go- 
mez, qiCil decouvrit en 1525 (Land of Etienne Gomez, 
which he discovered in 1525)." This chart, with a me- 
moir, was published at Weimar in the last century. 

Jean Alphonse, Roberval's pilot in Canada in 1642, 
one of the most skilful navigators of his time, and who 
has given remarkably minute and accurate direction for 



PKOVINCETOWN. 221 

sailing up the St. Lawrence, showing that he knows what 
he is talking about, says in his " EoiUier " (it is in Hack- 
luyt), "I have been at a bay as far as the forty-second de- 
gree, between Norimbegue [the Penobscot ?] and Florida, 
but I have not explored the bottom of it, and I do not 
know whether it passes from one land to the other," i. e. 
to Asia. (" J'ai ete a une Baye jusques par les 42^ degres 
entre la Norimbegue et la Floride ; mais je n'en ai pas 
cherche le fond, et ne S9ais pas si elle passe d'une terre k 
I'autre.") This may refer to Massachusetts Bay, if not 
possibly to the western inclination of the coast a little 
farther south. When he says, " I have no doubt that 
the Norimbegue enters into the river of Canada," he is 
perhaps so interpreting some account which the Indians 
had given respecting the route from the St. Lawrence to 
the Atlantic, by the St, John, or Penobscot, or possibly 
even the Hudson River. 

We hear rumors of this country of " Norumbega " and 
its great city from many quarters. In a discourse by a 
great French sea-captain in Ramusio's third volume 
(1556-65), this is said to be the name given to the land 
by its inhabitants, and Verrazzani is called the discoverer 
of it; another in 1607 makes the natives call it, or the 
river, Aguncia. It is represented as an island on an 
accompanying chart. It is frequently spoken of by old 
writers as a country of indefinite extent, between Canada 
and Florida, and it appears as a large island Avith Cape 
Breton at its eastern extremity, on the map made accord- 
ing to Verrazzani's plot in Ilackluy*' " Divers Voyages.'* 
These maps and rumors may have been the origin of 
the notion, common among the early settlers, that New 
England was an island. The country and city of No- 
rumbega appear about where Maine now is on a map in 



222 •CAPE COD. 

Ortelius (" Theatrum Orbis Terrarum," Antwerp, 1570), 
and the " R. Grande " is d^a^Yn where the Penobscot or 
St. John might be. 

In 1604, Champlain being sent by the Sieur de 
Monts to explore the coast of Norumbcgue, sailed up 
the Penobscot twenty-two or twenty-three leagues from 
" Isle Haute," or till he was stopped by the falls. He 
says : " I think that this river is that which many pilots 
and historians call Norembegue, and which the greater 
part have described as great and spacious, with numer- 
ous islands ; and its entrance in the forty-third or forty- 
third and one half, or, according to others, the forty-fourth 
degree of latitude, more or less." He is convinced that 
" the greater part " of those who speak of a great city 
there have never seen it, but repeat a mere rumor, but he 
thinks that some have seen the mouth of the river since 
it answers to their description. 

Under date of 1 607 Champlain writes : " Three or 
four leagues north of the Cap de Poitrincourt [near the 
head of the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia] we found a 
cross, which was very old, covered with moss and almost 
all decayed, which was an evident sign that there had 
formerly been Christians there." 

Also the following passage from Lesearbot will show 
how much the neighboring coasts were frequented by 
Europeans in the sixteenth century. Speaking of his re- 
turn from Port Royal to France in 1 607, he says : " At 
last, within four leagues of Campseau [the Gut of Canso], 
we arrived at a harbor [in Nova Scotia], where a worthy 
old gentleman from St. John de Lus, named Captain 
Savale, was fishing, who received us with the utmost 
courtesy. And as this harbor, which is small, but very 
good, has no name, I have given it on my geographical 



PROVINCETOWN. 223 

chart the name of Savalet." [It is on Champlain's 
map also.] This worthy man told us that this voyage 
was the forty-second which he had made to those parts, 
and yet the Newfoundlanders \_Terre neuviers'] make 
only one a year. ' He was wonderfully content with 
his fishery, and informed us that he made daily fifty 
crowns' worth of cod, and that his voyage would be 
worth ten thousand francs. He had sixteen men in 
his employ ; and his vessel was of eighty tons, which 
could carry a hundred thousand dry cod." (Histoire 
de la Nouvelle France, 1612.) They dried their fish 
on the rocks on shore. 

The " Isola della Rena " (Sable Island ?) appears on 
the chart of " Nuova Francia " and Norumbega, accom- 
panying the "Discourse" above referred to in Ramusio's 
third volume, edition 1556-65. Champlain speaks of 
there being at the Isle of Sable, in 1604, " grass pastured 
by oxen (hoetffs) and cows which the Portuguese carried 
there more than sixty years ago," i. e. sixty years before 
1613 ; in a later edition he says, which came out of a 
Spanish vessel which was lost in endeavoring to settle 
on the Isle of Sable ; and he states that De la Roche's 
men, who were left on this island seven years from 1598, 
lived on the flesh of these cattle which they found " en 
guantie" and built houses out of the wrecks of vessels 
which came to the island ("perhaps Gilbert's"), there 
being no wood or stone. Lescarbot says that they lived 
"on fish and the milk of cows left there about eighty years 
before by Baron de Leri and Saint Just." Charlevoix 
says they ate up the cattle and then lived on fish. Hali- 
burton speaks of cattle left there as a rumor. De Leri 
and Saint Just had suggested plans of colonization on 
the Isle of Sable as early as 1515 (1508?) according to 



224 CAPE COD. 

Bancroft, referring to Charlevoix. These are but a 
few of the instances which I might quote. 

Cape Cod is commonly said to have been discovered 
in 1602. We will consider at length under what cir- 
cumstances, and with what observation and expectations, 
the first Englishmen whom history clearly discerns ap- 
proached the coast of New England. According to 
the accounts of Archer and Brereton (both of whom 
accompanied Gosnold), on the 26th of March, 1602, 
old style, Captain Bartholomew Gosnold set sail from 
Falmouth, England, for tlie North Part of Virghiia, in 
a small bark called the Concord, they being in all, says 
one account, " thirty -two persons, whereof eight mariners 
and sailors, twelve purposing upon the discovery to re- 
turn with the ship for England, the rest remain there for 
population." This is regarded as " the first attempt of 
the English to make a settlement within the limits of 
New England." Pursuing a new and a shorter course 
than the usual one by the Canaries, " the 14th of April 
following " they had sight of Saint Mary's, an island of 
the Azores." As their sailors were few and " none of 
the best," (I use their own phrases,) and they were 
" going upon an unknown coast," they were not " over- 
bold to stand in with the shore but in open weather" ; so 
they made their first discovery of land with the lead. 
The 23d of April the ocean appeared yellow, but on tak- 
ing up some of the water in a bucket, "it altered not 
either in color or taste from the sea azure." The 7th 
of May they saw divers birds whose names they knew, 
and many others in their " English tongue of no name." 
The 8th of May " the water changed to a yellowish 
green, where at seventy fathoms " they " had ground.' 
The 9th, they had upon their lead " many glittering 



PROVINCETOWN. 225 

stones," — " which might promise some mineral matter 
in the bottom." The 10th, they were over a bank 
which they thought to be near the western end of St. 
John's Ishmd, and saw schools of fish. The 12th, 
they say, "continually passed fleeting by us sea-oare, 
which seemed to have their movable course towards 
the northeast." On the 13th, they observed "great 
beds of weeds, much wood, and divers things else float- 
ing by," and " had smeHing of tlie shore much as from 
the southern Cape and Andalusia in Spain." On Fri- 
day, the 14th, early in the morning they descried land 
on the north, in the latitude of forty-three degrees, ap- 
parently some part of the coast of Maine. "William- 
son (History of Maine) says it certainly could not 
have been south of the central Isle of Shoals. Bel- 
knap inclines to think it the south side of Cape Ann. 
Standing fair along by the shore, about twelve o'clock 
the same day, they came to anchor and were visited by 
eight savages, who came off to them " in a Biscay shallop, 
with sail and oars," — "an iron grapple, and a kettle 
of copper." These they at first mistook for " Chris- 
tians distressed." One of them was " apparelled with 
a waistcoat and breeches of black serge, made after our 
sea-fashion, hoes and shoes on his feet ; all the rest 
(:-aving one that had a pair of breeches of blue cloth) 
were naked." They appeared to have had dealings with 
" some Basques of St. John de Luz, and to understand 
much more than we," say the English, "for want of 
language, could comprehend." But they soon " set sail 
■westward, leaving them and their coast." (This was a 
remarkable discovery for discoverers.) 

" The 15th day," writes Gabriel Archer, " we had 
again sight of the land, which made ahead, being as wo 
10* o 



226 CAPE COD. 

thouglit an island, by reason of a large sound that ap- 
peared westward between it and the main, for coming to 
the west end thereof, we did perceive a large opening, 
we called it Shoal Hope. Near this cape we came to 
anchor in fifteen fathoms, where we took great store of 
cod-fish, for which we altered the name^ and called it 
Cape Cod. Here we saw skulls of herring, mackerel, 
and other small fish, in great abundance. This is a low 
sandy shoal, but without danger ; also we came to anchor 
again in sixteen fiithoms, fair by the land in the latitude 
of forty-two degrees. This Cape is well near a mile 
broad, and lieth northeast by east. The Captain went 
here ashore, and found the ground to be full of peas, straw- 
berries, whortleberries, &c., as then unripe, the sand also 
by the shore somewhat deep ; the firewood there by us 
taken in was of cypress, birch, witch-hazel, and beach. 
A young Indian came here to the captain, armed with 
his bow and arrows, and had certain plates of copper 
hanging at his ears ; he showed a willingness to help us 
in our occasions." 

" The 16th we trended the coast southerly, which was 
all champaign and full of grass, but the islands some- 
what woody." 

Or, according to the account of John Brereton, " rid- 
ing here," that is where tliey first communicated with the 
natives, " in no very good harbor, and withal doubting 
the weather, about three of the clock the same day in 
the afternoon we weighed, and standing southerly off 
into sea the rest of that day and the night following, with 
a fresh gale of wind, in the morning we found ourselves 
embayed with a mighty headland; but coming to an 
anchor about nine of the clock the same day, within 
a league of the shore, we hoisted out the one half of our 



PROVINCETOWN. 227 

shallop, and Captain Bartholomew Gosnold, myself and 
three others, went ashore, being a white sandy and very 
bold shore ; and marching all that afternoon with our 
muskets on our necks, on the highest hills which we saw 
(the weather very hot), at length we perceived this 
headland to be parcel of the main, and sundry islands 
lying almost round about it ; so returning towards even- 
ing to our shallop (for by ^at time the other part was 
brought ashore and set together), we espied an Indian, 
a young man of proper stature, and of a pleasing coun- 
tenance, and after some familiarity with him, we left him 
at the sea side, and returned to our ship, where in five 
or six hours' absence we had pestered our ship so with 
codfish, that we threw numbers of them overboard again : 
and surely I am persuaded that in the months of March, 
April, and May, there is upon this coast better fishing, 
and in as great plenty, as in Newfoundland ; for the 
skulls of mackerel, herrings, cod, and other fish, that we 
daily saw as we went and came from the shore, were 
wonderful," &c. 

" From this place we sailed round about this headland, 
almost all the points of the compass, the shore very bold ; 
but as no coast is free from dangers, so I am persuaded 
this is as free as any. Tlie land somewhat low, full of 
goodly woods, but in some places plain." 

It is not quite clear on which side of the Cape they 
landed. If it was inside, as would appear from Brere- 
ton's words, " From this place we sailed round about 
this headland almost all the points of the compass," it 
must have been on the western shore either of Truro or 
Wellfleet. To one sailing south into Barnstable Bay 
along the Cape, the only " white, sandy, and very bold 
shore " that appears is in these towns, though the bank 



228 CAPE COD. 

is not so high there as on the eastern side. At a distance 
of four or five miles the sandy cliffs there look like a 
long fort of yellow sandstone, they are so level and 
regular, especially in Wellfleet, — the fort of the land 
defending itself against the encroachments of the Ocean. 
They are streaked here and there with a reddish sand 
as if painted. Farther south the shore is more flat, and 
less obviously and abruptly sandy, and a little tinge of 
green here and there in the marshes appears to the 
sailor like a rare and precious emerald. But in the 
Journal of Pring's Voyage the next year (and Salterne, 
who was with Pring, had accompanied Gosnold) it is 
said, " Departing hence [i. e. from Savage Rocks] we 
bore unto that great gulf which Captain Gosnold over- 
shot the year before."* 

So they sailed round the Cape, calling the south- 
easterly extremity " Point Cave," till they came to an 
island which they named Martha's Vineyard (now called 
No Man's Land), and another on which they dwelt 
awhile, which they named Elizabeth's Island, in honor 
of the queen, one of the group since so called, now 
known by its Indian name Cuttyhunk. There they 
built a small storehouse, the first house built by the 
English in New England, whose cellar could recently 
still be seen, made partly of stones taken from the beach. 
Bancroft says (edition of 1837), the ruins of the fort 
can no longer be discerned. They who were to have 

* " Savage Rock," which some have supposed to be, from tlie 
name, the Salvages, a ledge about two miles off Rockland, Capo 
Ann, was probably the Nubble, a large, high rock near the shore, on 
the east side of York Harbor, JIaine. The first land made by Gos- 
nold is presumed by experienced navigators to be Cape Elizabeth, 
on the same coast. (See Babsou's History of Gloucester, Massachu- 
Metts.) 



PEOVINCETOWN. 229 

remained becoming discontented, all together set sail for 
England with a load of sassafras and other commodities, 
on the 18th of June following. 

Tlie next year came Martin Pring, looking for sassa- 
fras, and thereafter they began to come thick and fast, 
until long after sassafras had lost its reputation. 

These are the oldest accounts which we have of Cape 
Cod, unless, perchance, Cape Cod" is, as some suppose, 
the same with that " Kial-ar-nes " or Keel-Cape, on 
which, according to old Icelandic manuscripts, Thorwald, 
son of Eric the Red, after sailing many days southwest 
from Greenland, broke his keel in the year 1004 ; and 
where, according to another, in some respects less trust- 
worthy manuscript, Thor-finn Karlsefue (" that is, one 
who promises or is destined to be an able or great man " ; 
he is said to have had a son born in New England, from 
whom Thorwaldsen the sculptor was descended), sailing 
past, in the year 1007, with his wife Gudrida, Snorre 
Thorbrandson, Biarne Grinolfson, and Thorhall Garnla- 
son, distinguished Norsemen, in three ships containing 
" one hundred and sixty men and all sorts of live stock " 
(probably the first Norway rats among the rest), having 
the land " on the right side " of them, " roved ashore," 
and found " Or-ceji (trackless deserts)," and " Strand-ir 
lang-ar ok sand-ar (long narrow beaches and sand-hills)," 
'and "called the shoves Furdu-stra7id-ir (Wonder-Strands), 
because the sailing by them seemed long." 

According to the Icelandic manuscripts, Thorwald was 
the first then, — unless possibly one Biarne Hcriulfson 
(i. e. son of Heriulf ) who had been seized with a great 
desire to travel, sailing from Iceland to Greenland in the 
year 986 to join his father who had migrated thither, for he 
had resolved, says the manuscript, " to spend the follow- 



230 CAPE COD. 

ing winter, like all the preceding ones, with his father," — 
being driven far to the southwest by a storm, when it 
cleared up saw the low land of Cape Cod looming faintly 
in the distance ; but this not answering to the description 
of Greenland, he put his vessel about, and, sailing north- 
ward along the coast, at length reached Greenland and 
his father. At any rate, he may put forth a strong claim 
to be regarded as the discoverer of the American con- 
tinent. 

These Northmen were a hardy race, whose younger 
sons inherited the ocean, and traversed it without chart 
or compass, and they are said to have been " the first 
who learned the art of sailing on a wind." Moreover, 
they had a habit of casting their door-posts overboard 
and settling wherever they went ashore. But as Biarne, 
and Thorwald, and Thorfinn have not mentioned the 
latitude and longitude distinctly enough, though we have 
great respect for them as skilful and adventurous navi- 
gators, we must for the present remain in doubt as to 
what capes they did see. We think that they were con- 
siderably further north. 

If time and space permitted, I could present the 
claims of several other worthy persons. Lescarbot, 
in 1 609, asserts that the French sailors had been accus- 
tomed to frequent the Newfoundland Banks from time 
immemorial, " for the codfish with which they feed al- 
most all Europe and supply all sea-going vessels," and 
accordingly " the language of the nearest lands is half 
Basque " ; and he quotes Postel, a learned but extrava- 
gant French author, born in 1510, only six years after 
the Basques, Bretons, and Normans are said to have 
discovered the Grand Bank and adjacent islands, as 
saying, in his Gharte Geographique, which we have not 



PROVINCETOWN. 231 

seen : " Terra liaec ob lucrosissimam piscationis utilita- 
tem summa litterarum raemoria a Gallis adiri solita, et 
ante raille sexcentos annos frequentari solita est; sed 
eo quod sit urbibus inculta et vasta, spreta est." " This 
land, on account of its very lucrative fishery, was accus- 
tomed to be visited by the Gauls from the very dawn 
of history, and more than sixteen hundred years ago 
was accustomed to be frequented; but because it was 
unadorned with cities, and waste, it was despised." 

It is the old story. Bob Smith discovered the mine, 
but I discovered it to the world. And now Bob Smith 
is putting in his claim. 

But let us not laugh at Postel and his visions. He 
was perhaps better posted up than we ; and if he does 
seem to draw the long-bow, it may be because he had 
a long way to shoot, — quite across the Atlantic. If 
America was found and lost again once, as most of us 
believe, then why not twice ? especially as there were 
likely to be so few records of an earlier discovery. 
Consider what stuff history is made of, — that for the 
most part it is merely a story agreed on by posterity. 
Who will tell us even how many Russians were en- 
gaged in the battle of the Chernaya, the other day? 
Yet no doubt Mr. Scriblerus, the historian, will fix on 
a definite number for the schoolboys to commit to their 
excellent memories. What, then, of the number of Per- 
sians at Salamis? The historian whom I read knew as 
much about the position of the parties and their tactics 
in the last-mentioned affair, as they who describe a 
recent battle in an article for the press now-a-days, 
before the particulars have arrived. I believe that, if I 
were to live the life of mankind over again myself, 
(which I would not be hired to do,) with the Universal 



23-2 CAPE COD. 

History in my hands, I should not be able to tell what 
was what. 

Earlier than the date Postel refers to, at any rate, 
Cape Cod lay in utter darkness to the civilized world, 
though even then the sun rose from eastward out of the 
sea every day, and, rolling over the Cape, went down 
westward into the Bay. It was even then Cape and 
Bay, — ay, the Cape of Codfish, and the Bay of the 
Massachusetts, perchance. 

Quite recently, on the 11th of November, 1620, old 
style, as is well known, the Pilgrims in the Mayflower 
came to anchor in Cape Cod Harbor. They had loosed 
from Plymouth, England, the 6th of September, and, in 
the words of " Mourt's Relation," " after many difficul- 
ties in boisterous storms, at length, by God's providence, 
upon the 9th of November, we espied land, which we 
deemed to be Cape Cod, and so afterward it proved. 
Upon the 11th of November we came to anchor in the 
bay, which is a good harbor and pleasant bay, circled 
round except in the entrance, which is about four miles 
over from land to land, compassed about to the very sea 
with oaks, pines, juniper, sassafras, and other sweet 
wood. It is a harbor wherein a thousand sail of ships 
may safely ride. There we relieved ourselves with 
wood and water, and refreshed our people, while our 
shallop was fitted to coast the bay, to search for an habi- 
tation." There we put up at Fuller's Hotel, passing by 
the Pilgrim House as too high for us (we learned after- 
ward that we need not have been so particular), and we 
refreshed ourselves with hashed fish and beans, beside 
taking in a supply of liquids (which were not intox- 
icating), while our legs were refitted to coast the back- 
side. Further say the Pilgrims : " "We could not come 



PROVINCETOWN. 233 

near the shore by three quarters of an English mile, 
because of shallow water ; which was a great prejudice 
to us; for our people going on shore were forced to 
wade a bow-shot or two in going aland, which caus^ed 
many to get colds and coughs ; for it was many times 
freezing cold weather." They afterwards say : " It 
brought much weakness amongst us"; and no doubt it 
led to the death of some at Plymouth. 

The harbor of Provincetown is very shallow near the 
shore, especially about the head, where the Pilgrims 
landed. When I left this place the next summer, the 
steamer could not get up to the wharf, but we were 
carried out to a large boat in a cart as much as thirty 
rods in shallow water, while a troop of httle boys kept 
us company, wading around, and thence we pulled to the 
steamer by a rope. The harbor being thus shallow and 
sandy about the shore, coasters are accustomed to run in 
here to paint their vessels, which are left high and dry 
when the tide goes down. 

It chanced that the Sunday morning that we were 
there, I had joined a party of men who were smoking 
and lolling over a pile of boards on one of the wharves, 
{nihil humanum a me, S^c.,) when our landlord, who was 
a sort of ti thing-man, went off to stop some sailors who 
were engaged in painting their vessel. Our party was 
recruited from time to time by other citizens, who came 
rubbing their eyes as if they had just got out of bed; 
and one old man remarked to me that it was the custom 
there to lie abed very late on Sunday, it being a day of 
rest. I remarked that, as I thought, they might as well 
let the man paint, for all us. It was not noisy work, and 
would not disturb onr devotions. But a young man in 
the company, taking his pipe out of his mouth, said that 



234 CAPE COD. 

it was a plain contradiction of the law of God, which he 
quoted, and if they did not have some such regulation, 
vessels would run in there to tar, and rig, and paint, 
and they would have no Sabbath at all. This was a 
good argument enough, if he had not put it in the name 
of religion. The next summer, as I sat on a hill there 
one sultry Sunday afternoon, the meeting-house win- 
dows being open, my meditations were interrupted by 
the noise of a preacher who shouted like a boatswain, 
profaning the quiet atmosphere, and who, I fancied, 
must have taken off his coat. Few things could have 
been more disgusting or disheartening. I wished the 
tithing-man would stop him. 

The Pilgrims say : " There was the greatest store of 
fowl that ever we saw." 

We saw no fowl there, except gulls of various kinds ; 
but the greatest store of them that ever we saw was on 
a flat but slightly covered with water on the east side of 
the harbor, and w„e observed a man who had landed 
there from a boat creeping along the shore in order to 
get a shot at them, but they all rose and flew away in a 
great scattering flock, too soon for him, having appar- 
ently got their dinners, though he did not get his. 

It is remarkable that the Pilgrims (or their reporter) 
describe this part of the Cape, not only as well wooded, 
but as having a deep and excellent soil, and hardly men- 
tion the word sand. Now what strikes the voyager is 
the barrenness and desolation of the land. They found 
" the ground or earth sand-hills, much like the downs in 
Holland, but much better the crust of the earth, a spit's 
depth, excellent black earth." We found that the earth 
had lost its crust, — if, indeed, it ever had any, — and 
that there was no soil to speak of. We did not see 



PROVINCETOWN. 235 

enough black earth in Provincetown to fill a flower-pot, 
unless in the swamps. They found it " all wooded with 
oaks, pines, sassafras, juniper, birch, holly, vines, some 
ash, walnut ; the wood for the most part open and with- 
out underwood, fit either to go or ride in." We saw 
scarcely anything high enough to be called a tree, except 
a little low wood at the east end of the town, and the 
few ornamental trees in its yards, — only a few small 
specimens of some of the above kinds on the sand-hills 
in the rear ; but it was all thick shrubbery, without any 
large wood above it, very unfit either to go or ride in. 
The greater part of the land was a perfect desert of 
yellow sand, rippled like waves by the wind, in which 
only a little Beach-grass grew here and there. They 
say that, just after passing the head of East Harbor 
Creek, the boughs and bushes "tore" their "very armor 
in pieces " (the same thing happened to such armor as 
we wore, when out of curiosity we took to the bushes) ; 
or they came to deep valleys, " full of brush, wood-gaile, 
and long grass," and " found springs of fresh water." 

For the most part we saw neither bough nor bush, not 
'SO much as a shrub to tear our clothes against if we 
would, and a sheep would lose none of its fleece, even 
if it found herbage enough to make fleece grow there. 
We saw rather beach and poverty-grass, and merely 
sorrel enough to color the surface. I suppose, then, by 
Wood-gaile they mean the Bayberry. 

All accounts agree in affirming that this part of the 
Cape was comparatively well wooded a century ago. 
But notwithstanding, the great changes which have taken 
place in these respects, I cannot but think that we must 
make some allowance for the greenness of the Pilgrims 
in these matters, which caused them to see green. We 



236 CAPE COD. 

do not believe that the trees were large or the soil was 
deep here. Tiieir account may be true particularly, but 
it is generally false. They saw litemlly, as well as 
figuratively, but one side of the Cape. Tliey naturally 
exaggerated the fairness and attractiveness of the land, 
for they were glad to get to any land at all after that 
anxious voyage. Everything appeared to them of the 
color of the rose, and had the scent of juniper and sassa- 
fras. Very dit^erent is the general and otf-hand account 
given by Captain John Smith, who was on this coast six 
years earlier, and speaks like an old traveller, voyager, 
and soldier, who had seen too much of the world to 
exaggerate, or even to dwell long, on a part of it. In 
his "Description of New England," printed in 1(316, 
after speaking of Accomack, since called Plymouth, he 
says : " Cape Cod is the next presents itself, which is 
only a headland of high hills of sand, overgrown with 
shrubby pines, Iiurts [i. e. whorts, or whortleberries], 
and such trash, but an excellent harbor for all weath- 
ers. This Cape is made by the main sea on the one 
side, and a great bay on the other, in form of a sickle." 
Champlain had already written, " Which we named Cap 
J^hmc (Cape White), because they were sands and downs 
(^Siihks et dunes) which appeared thus.*' 

When the Pilgrims get to Plymouth their reporter 
says again, " The land^ for the crust of the earth is a 
spit's depth," — that would seem to be their recipe for an 
earth's crust, — '' excellent black mould and fat in some 
places." Ho^^ever, according to Bradford himself, whom 
some consider the author of part of '* Mourt's Relation,'* 
they who came over in the Fortune the next year were 
somewhat daunted when '' they came into the harbor of 
Gipe Cod, and there saw nothing but a niiked and barren 



PROVINCETOWN. 237 

place." Th(.'y soon found out their mistake with re- 
spect to the goodness of Plymouth soil. Yet when at 
length, some years later, when they were fully sati^fied 
of the poorness of the place which they had chosen, 
"the greater part," says Bradford, "consented to ii re- 
moval to a place called Nausett," they agreed to remove 
all together to Nauset, now Eastham, which was jump- 
ing out of the frying-pan into the fire ; and some of 
the most respectable of the inhabitants of Plymouth did 
actually remove thither accordingly. 

It must be confessed that the Pilgrims possessed but 
few of the qualities of the modern pioneer. They were 
not the ancestors of the American backwoodsmen. They 
did not go at once into the woods with their axes. They 
were a family and church, and were more anxious to 
keep together, though it were on the sand, than to ex- 
plore and colonize a New World. Wlien the above- 
mentioned company removed to Eastham, the church at 
Plymouth was left, to use Bradford's expression, " like 
an ancient mother grown old, and forsaken of her chil- 
dren." Though they landed on Clark's Island in Ply- 
mouth harbor, the 9th "of December (0. S.), and the 
16th all hands came to Plymouth, and the 18th they 
rambled about the mainland, and the 19th decided to 
settle there, it was the 8th of January before Francis 
Billington went with one of the master's mates to look 
at the magnificent pond or lake now called " Billington 
Sea," about two miles distant, which he had discovered 
from the top of a tree, and mistook for a great sea., And 
the 7th of -March " Master Carver with five others went 
to the great ponds which seem to be excellent fishing," 
both which points are within the compass of an ordinary 
afternoon's ramble, — however wild the country. It is 



238 CAPE COD. 

true they were busy at first about their building, and 
were hindered in that by much foul weather ; but a party 
of emigrants to California or Oregon, with no less work 
on their hands, — and more hostile Indians, — would do 
as much exploring the first afternoon, and the Sieur de 
Champlain would have sought an interview with the 
savages, and examined the countrj^ as far as the Connect- 
icut, and made a map of it, before Billington had climbed 
his tree. Or contrast them only with the French search- 
ing for copper about the Bay of Fundy in 1603, tracing 
up small streams with Indian guides. Nevertheless, the 
Pilgrims were pioneers, and the ancestors of pioneers, in 
a far grander enterprise. 

. By this time we saw the little steamer Naushon en- 
tering the harbor, and heard the sound of her whistle, 
and came down from the hills to meet her at the wharf. 
So we took leave of Cape Cod and its inhabitants. We 
liked the manners of the last, what little we saw of them, 
very much. They were particularly downright and 
good-humored. The old people appeared remarkably 
well preserved, as if by the saltness of the atmosphere, 
and after having once mistaken, we could never be cer- 
tain whether we were talking to a coeval of our grand- 
parents, or to one of our own age. They are said to be 
more purely the descendants of the Pilgrims than the in- 
habitants of any other part of the State. We were told 
that " sometimes, when the court comes together at Barn- 
stable, they have not a single criminal to try, and the 
jail is shut up." It was " to let " when we were there. 
Until quite recently there was no regular lawyer below 
Orleans. Who then will complain of a few regular man- 
eating sharks along the back-side? 

One of the ministers of Truro, when I asked what 



PROVINCETOWN. 239 

the fishermen did in the winter, answered that they did 
nothing but go a-visiting, sit about and tell stories, — 
though they worked hard in summer. Yet it is not a long 
vacation they get. I am sorry that I have not been 
there in the winter to hear their yarns. Almost every 
Cape man is Captain of some craft or other, — every 
man at least who is at the head of his own affairs, though 
it is not every one that is, for some heads have the force 
of Alpha privative, negativing all the efforts which Nature 
would fain make through them. The greater number of 
men are merely corporals. It is worth the while to talk 
with one whom his neighbors address as Captain, though 
his craft may have long been sunk, and he may be hold- 
ing by his teeth to the shattered mast of a pipe alone, 
and only gets half-seas-over in a figurative sense, now. 
He is pretty sure to vindicate his right to the title at 
last, — can tell one or two good stories at least. 

For the most part we saw only the back side of the 
towns, but our story is true as far as it goes. AYe might 
have made more of the Bay side, but we were inclined 
to open our eyes widest at the Atlantic. "We did not 
care to see those features of the Cape in which it is in- 
ferior or merely equal to the mainland, but only those 
in which it is peculiar or superior. We cannot say how 
its towns look in front to one who goes to meet them ; 
we went to see the ocean behind them. They were 
merely the raft on which we stood, and we took notice 
of the barnacles which adhered to it, and some carvings 
upon it. 

Before we left the wharf we made the acquaintance of 
a passenger whom we had seen at the hotel. When we 
asked him which way he came to Provincetown, he 
answered that he was cast ashore at Wood End, Saturday 



240 CAPE COD. 

night, in tlie same storm in which the St. John was 
wrecked. He had been at work as a carpenter in Maine, 
and took passage for Boston in a schooner laden with 
lumber. AVhen the storm came on, thej endeavored to 
get into Provincetown harbor. " It was dark and misty," 
said he, " and as we were steering for Long Point Light 
we suddenly saw the land near us, — for our compass 
was out of order, — varied several degrees [a mariner 
always casts the blame on his compass], — but there be- 
ing a mist on shore, we thought it was farther off than 
it was, and so held on, and we immediately struck on the 
bar. Says the Captain, *We are all lost.' Says I to 
the Captain, ' Now don't let her strike again this way ; 
head her right on.' The Captain thought a moment, 
and then headed her on. The sea washed completely 
over us, and wellnigh took the breath out of my body. 
I held on to the running rigging, but I have learned to 
hold on to the standing rigging the next time." " Well, 
were there any drowned ? " I asked. " No ; we all got 
safe to a house at Wood End, at midnight, wet to our 
skins, and half frozen to death." ' He had apparently 
spent the time since playing checkers at the hotel, and 
was congratulating himself on having beaten a tall fellow- 
boarder at that game. "The vessel is to be sold at 
auction to-day," he added. (We had heard the sound 
of the crier's bell which advertised it.) " The Captain is 
rather down about it, but I tell him to cheer up and he 
will soon get another vessel." 

At that moment the Captain called to him from the 
wharf. He looked like a man just from the country, 
with a cap made of a woodchuck's skin, and now that I 
had heard a part of his history, he appeared singularly 
destitute, — a Captain without any vessel, only a great- 



PROVINCETOWN. 241 

coat ! and that perhaps a borrowed one ! Not even a 
dog followed him ; only his title stuck to him. I also 
saw one of the crew. They all had caps of the same 
pattern, and wore a subdued look, in addition to their 
naturally aquiline features, as if a breaker — a " comb- 
er" — had washed over them. As we passed Wood End, 
we noticed the pile of lumber on the shore which had 
made the cargo of their vessel. 

About Long Point in the summer you commonly see 
them *catching lobsters for the New York market, from 
small boats just off the shore, or rather, the lobsters 
catch themselves, for they cling to the netting on which 
the bait is placed of their own accord, and thus are 
drawn up. They sell them fresh for two cents apiece. 
Man needs to know but little more than a lobster in 
order to catch him in his traps. The mackerel fleet had 
been getting to sea, one after another, ever since mid- 
night, and as we were leaving the Cape we passed near 
to many of them under sail, and got a nearer view than 
we had had ; — half a dozen red-shirted men and boys, 
leaning over the rail to look at us, the skipper shouting 
back the number of barrels he had caught, in answer to 
our inquiry. All sailors pause to watch a steraner, and 
shout in welcome or derision. In one a large Newfound- 
land dog put his paws on the rail and stood up as high 
as any of them, and looked as wise. But the skipper, 
who did not wish to be seen no better employed than a 
dog, rapped him on the nose and sent him below. Such 
is human justice ! I thought I could hear him making 
an effective appeal down there from human to divine 
justice. He must have had much the cleanest breast 
of the two. 

Still, many a mile behind us across the Bay, we saw 
11 p 



242 CAPE COD. 

the white sails of tlie mackerel fishers hovering round 
Cape Cod, and when they were all hull-down, and the 
low extremity of the Cape was also down, their white 
sails still appeared on both sides of it, around where it 
had sunk, like a city on the ocean, proclaiming the rare 
qualities of Cape Cod Harbor. But before the extrem- 
ity of the Cape had completely sunk, it appeared like 
a filmy sliver of land lying flat on the ocean, and later 
still a mere reflection of a sand-bar on the haze above. 
Its name suggests a homely truth, but it would be more 
poetic if it described the impression which it makes on 
the beholder. Some capes have peculiarly suggestive 
names. There is Cape Wrath, the northwest point of 
Scotland, for instance ; what a good name for a cape 
lying far away dark over the water under a lowering sky ! 
Mild as it was on shore this morning, the wind was 
cold and piercing on the water. Though it be the hot- 
test day in July on land, and the voyage is to last but 
four hours, take your thickest clothes with you, for you 
are about to float over melted icebergs. "When I left 
Boston in the steamboat on the 25th of June the next 
year, it was a quite warm day on shore. The pas- 
sengers were dressed in their thinnest clothes, and at first 
sat under their umbrellas, but when we were fairly out 
on the Bay, such as had only their coats were suffering 
with the cold, and sought the shelter of the pilot's house 
and the warmth of the chimney. But when we ap- 
proached the harbor of Provincetown, I was surprised 
to perceive what an influence that low and narrow strip 
of sand, only a mile or two in width, had over the tem- 
perature of the air for many miles around. We pene- 
trated into a sultry atmosphere where our thin coats 
were once more in fashion, and found the inhabitants 
sweltering. 



PROVINCETOWN. 243 

Leaving far on one side Manomet Point in Plymouth 
and the Scituate shore, after being out of sight of land 
for an hour or two, for it was rather hazy, we neared 
the Cohasset Eocks again at Minot's Ledge, and saw the 
great Tupelo-tree on the edge of Scituate, which lifts its 
dome, like an umbelliferous plant, high over the surround- 
ing forest, and is conspicuous for many miles over land 
and water. Here was the new iron light-house, then 
unfinished, in the shape of an egg-shell painted red, and 
placed high on iron pillars, like the ovum of a sea mon- 
ster floating on the waves, — destined to be phosphores- 
cent. As we passed it at half-tide we saw the spray 
tossed up nearly to the shell. A man was to live in that 
egg-shell day and night, a mile from the shore. When 
I passed it the next summer it was finished and two men 
lived in it, and a light-house keeper said that they told 
him that in a recent gale it had rocked so as to shake 
the plates off the table. Think of making your bed 
thus in the crest of a breaker ! To have the*waves, like 
a pack of hungry wolves, eying you always, night and 
day, and from time to time making a spring at you, 
almost sure to have you at last. And not one of all 
those voyagers can come to your relief, — but when yon 
light goes out, it will be a sign that the light of your life 
has gone out also. What a place to compose a work on 
breakers ! This light-house was the cynosure of all 
eyes. "Every passenger watched it for half an hour at 
least ; yet a colored cook belonging to the boat, whom I 
had seen come out of his quarters several times to empty 
his dishes over the side with a flourish, chancing to come 
out just as we were abreast of this light, and not more 
than forty rods from it, and were all gazing at it, as he 
drew back his arm, caught sight of it, and with surprise 



24-1: CAPE COD. 

exclaimed, " What 's that ? " He had been employed oa 
this boat for a year, and passed this light every week- 
day, but as he had never chanced to empty his dishes 
just at that point, had never seen it before. To look at 
lights was the pilot's business; he minded the kitchen 
fire. It suggested how little some who voyaged round 
the world could manage to see. You would almost as 
easily believe that there are men who never yet chanced 
to come out at the right time to see the sun. What 
avails it though a light be placed on the top of a hill, if 
you spend all your life directly under the hill ? It might 
as well be under a bushel. This light-house, as is well 
known, was swept away in a storm in April, 1851, and 
the two men in it, and the next morning not a vestige of 
it was to be seen from the shore. 

A Hull man told me that he helped set up a white- 
oak pole on Minot's Ledge some years before. It was 
fifteen inches in diameter, forty-one feet high, sunk four 
feet in the rock, and was secured by four guys, — but it 
stood only one year. Stone piled up cob-fashion near 
the same place stood eight years. 

When I crossed the Bay in the Melrose in July, we 
hugged the Scituate shore as long as possible, in order 
to take advantage of the wind. Far out on the Bay 
(olf this shore) we scared up a brood of young ducks, 
probably black ones, bred hereabouts, which the packet 
had frequently disturbed in her trips. A townsfnan, who 
was making the voyage for the first time, walked slowly 
round into the rear of the helmsman, when we were in 
the middle of the Bay, and looking out over the sea, 
before he sat down there, remarked with as much origi- 
nality as was possible for one who used a borrowed 
expression, " This is a great country." He had been 



PROVINCETOWN. 245 

a timber merchant, and I afterward saw liim taking the 
diameter of the mainmast with his stick, and estimating 
its height. I returned from the same excursion in the 
Olata, a very handsome and swift-saihng yacht, which 
left Provincetown at the same time with two other 
packets, the Meh^ose and FroHc. At first there was 
scarcely a breath of air stirring, and we loitered about 
Long Point for an hour in company, — with our heads 
over the rail watching the great sand-circles and the 
fishes at the bottom in calm water fifteen feet dee}). 
But after clearing the Cape we rigged a flying-jib, and, 
as the Captain had prophesied, soon showed our consorts 
our heels. There was a steamer six or eight miles 
northward, near the Cape, towing a large ship toward 
Boston. Its smoke stretched perfectly horizontal several 
miles over the sea, and by a sudden change in its direc- 
tion, warned us of a change in the wind before we felt 
it. The steamer appeared very far from the ship, and 
some young men who had frequently used the Captain's 
glass, but did not suspect that the vessels were connected, 
expressed surprise that they kept about the same dis- 
tance apart for so many hours. At which the Captain 
dryly remarked, that probably they would never get any 
nearer together. As long as tlie wind held we kept 
pace with the steamer, but at length it died away almost 
entirely, and the flying-jib did all the work. When wo 
passed the light-boat at Minot's Ledge, the Melrose and 
Frolic were just visible ten miles astern. 

Consider the islands bearing the names of all the 
saints, bristling with forts like chestnut-burs, or echini- 
dcBf yet the police will not let a couple of Irishmen have 
a private sparring-match on one of them, as it is a gov- 
ernment monopoly ; all the great seaports are in a box- 



246 CAPE COD. 

ing attitude, and you must sail prudently between two 
tiers of stony knuckles before you come to feel the 
warmth of their breasts. 

The Bermudas are said to have been discovered by a 
Spanish ship of that name which was wrecked on them, 
" which till then," says Sir John Smith, " for six thou- 
sand years had been nameless." The English did not 
stumble upon them in their first voyages to Virginia; 
and the first Englishman who was ever there was wrecked 
on them in 1593. Smith says, "2s'o place known hath 
better walls nor a broader ditch." Yet at the very first 
planting of them with some sixty persons, in 1612, the 
first Governor, the same year, *• built and laid the foun- 
dation of eight or nine forts." To be i^eady, one would 
say, to entertain the first ship's company that should be 
7iext shipwrecked on to them. It would have been 
more sensible to have built as* munj *• Charity-houses." 
These are the vexed Bermootliees. 

Our great sails caught all the air there was, and our 
low and narrow hull caused the least possible friction. 
Coming up the harbor against the stream we swept by 
everything. Some young men returning from a fishing 
excui-sion came to the side of their smack, while we 
were thus steadily drawing by them, and, bowing, ob- 
served, with the best possible grace, " We give it up.* 
Yet sometimes we were nearly at a stand-still. The 
sailors watched (two) objects on the shore to ascertain 
whether we advanced or receded. In the harbor it 
Avas like the evening of a holiday. The Eastern steam- 
boat passed us with music and a cheer, as if they were 

going to a ball, when they might be going to Davy's 

locker. 

I heard a bov teUins: the storv of Xix's mate to some 



PROVINCETOWN. 247 

girls as we passed that spot. That was the name of a 
sailor hung there, he said. — "If I am guilty, this island 
will remain ; but if I am innocent, it will be washed 
away," and now it is all washed away ! 

Next (?) came the fort on George's Island. These 
are bungling contrivances : not ouv fortes, hut our foibles, 
"Wolfe sailed by the strongest fort in North America in 
the dark, and took it. 

I admired the skill with which the vessel was at last 
bi;pught to her place in the dock, near the end of Long 
Wharf. It was candle-light, and my eyes could not dis- 
tinguish the wharves jutting out toward us, but it ap- 
peared like an even line of shore densely crowded with 
shipping. You could not have guessed within a quarter 
of a mile of Long Wharf. Nevertheless, we were to 
beblowivtoa crevice amid them, — steering right into 
the maze. Down goes the mainsail, and only the jib 
draws us along. Now we are within four rods of the 
shipping, having already dodged several outsiders ; but 
it is still only a maze of spars, and rigging, and hulls, 
— not a crack can be seen. Down goes the jib, but still 
we advance. The Captain stands aft with one hand on 
the tiller, and the other holding his night-glass, — his 
son stands on the bowsprit straining his eyes, — the pas- 
sengers feel their hearts half-way to their mouths, ex- 
pecting a crash. " Do you see any room there ? " asks 
the Captain, quietly. He must make up his mind in 
five seconds, else he will carry away that vessel's bow- 
sprit, or lose his own. " Yes, sir, here is a place for 
us " ; and in three minutes more we are fast to the 
wharf in a little gap between two bigger vessels. 

And now we were in Boston. Whoever has been 
down to the end of Long Wharf, and walked through 
Quincy Maiket, has seen Boston. 



248 CAPE COD. 

Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, New 
Orleans, and the rest, are the names of wharves project- 
ing into the sea (surrounded by the shops and dwellings 
of the merchants), good places to take in and to dis- 
charge a cargo (to land the products of other chmes and 
load the exports of our own). I see a great many bar- 
rels and fig-drums, — piles of wood for umbrella-sticks, 
— blocks of granite and ice, — great heaps of goods, 
and the means of packing and conveying them, — much 
wrapping-paper and twine, — many crates and hogsheads 
and trucks, — and that is Boston. The more barrels, 
the more Boston. The museums and scientific societies 
and libraries are accidental. They gather around the 
sands to save carting. The wharf-rats and custom-house 
officers, and broken-down poets, seeking a fortune amid 
the barrels. Their better or worse lyceums, and preach- 
ings, and doctorings, these, too, are accidental, and the 
malls of commons are always small potatoes. When I 
go to Boston, I naturally go sti-aight through the city 
(taking the Market in my way), down to the end of Long 
Wharf, and look off, for I have no cousins in the back 
alleys, — and there I see a great many countrymen in 
their shirt-sleeves from Maine, and Pennsylvania, and 
all along shore and in shore, and some foreigners beside, 
loading and unloading and steering their teams about, as 
at a country fair. 

When we reached Boston that October, I had a gill 
of Provincetown sand in my shoes, and at Concord there 
was still enough left to sand my pages for many a day ; 
and I seemed to hear the sea roar, as if I lived in a 
shell, for a week afterward. 

The places which I have described may seem strange 
and remote to my townsmen, — indeed, from Boston to 



PKOVLXCETOWN. 249 

Provincetown is twice as far as from England to France ; 
yet step into the cars, and in six hours you may stand 
on those four planks, and see the Cape which Gosnold 
is said to have discovered, and which I have so poorly 
described. If you had started when I first advised you, 
you might have seen our tracks in the sand, still fresh, 
and reaching all the way from the Nauset Lights to 
Race Point, some thirty miles, — for at every step we 
made an impression on the Cape, though we were not 
aware of it, and though our account may have made no 
impression on your minds. But what is our account ? 
In it there is no roar, no beach-birds, no tow-cloth. 

We often love to think now of the life of men on 
beaches, — at least in midsummer, when the weather is 
serene ; their sunny lives on the sand, amid the beach- 
grass and the bayberries, their companion a cow, their 
wealth a jag of drift-wood or a few beach-plums, and 
their music the surf and the peep of the beach-bird. 

"We went to see the Ocean, and that is probably the 
best place of all our coast to go to. If you go by water, 
you may experience what it is to leave and to approach 
these shores ; you may see the Stormy Petrel by the 
way, 6aka<T(Tohp6ixa, running over the sea, and if the 
weather is but a little thick, may lose sight of the land 
in mid-passage. I do not know where there is another 
beach in the Atlantic States, attached to the mainland, 
so long, and at the same time so straight, and completely 
uninterrupted by creeks or coves or fresh-water rivers or 
marshes ; for though there may be clear places on the 
map, they would probably be found by the foot traveller 
to be intersected by creeks and marshes ; certainly there 
is none where there is a double way, such as I have 
described, a beach and a bank, which at the same time 



250 CAPE COD. 

shows you the laud and the sea, and part of the time 
two seas. The Great South Beach of Long Island, 
which I have since visited, is longer still without an in- 
let, but it is literally a mere sand-bar, exposed, several 
miles from the Island, and not the edge of a continent 
wasting before the assaults of the ocean. Though wild 
and desolate, as it wants the bold bank, it possesses but 
half the grandeur of Cape Cod in my eyes, nor is the 
imagination contented with its southern aspect. The 
only other beaches of great length on our Atlantic coast, 
which I have heard sailors speak of, are those of Bar- 
negat on the Jersey shore, and Currituck between Vir- 
ginia and North Carolina ; but these, like the last, are 
low and narrow sand-bars, lying off the coast, and sepa- 
rated from the mainland by lagoons. Besides, as you go 
farther south the titles are feebler, and cease to add 
variety and grandeur to the shore. On the Pacific 
side of our country also no doubt there is good walking 
to be found ; a recent writer and dweller there tells us 
that " the coast from C^pe Disappointment (or the Colum- 
bia River) to Cape Flattery (at the Strait of Juan de 
Fuca) is nearly north and south, and can be travelled 
almost its entire length on a beautiful sand-beach," with 
the exception of two bays, four or five rivers, and a few 
points jutting into the sea. The common shell-fish found 
there seem to be often of corresponding types, if not 
identical species, with those of Cape Cod. The beach 
which I have described, however, is not hard enough 
for carriages, but must be explored on foot. "When one 
carriage has passed along, a following one sinks deeper 
still in its rut. It has at present no name any more 
than feme. That portion south of Nauset Harbor is 
commonly called Chatham Beach. The part in East- 



PROVINCETOWN. 251 

ham is called !^auset Beach, and off "Wellfleet and Tmro 
the Backside, or sometimes, perhaps, Cape Cod Beach. 
I think that part which extends without interruption 
from Nauset Harbor to Eace Point should be called 
Cape Cod Beach, and do so speak of it. 

One of the most attractive points for visitors is in 
the northeast part of Wellfleet, where accommodations 
(I mean for men and women of tolerable health and 
habits) could probably be had within half a mile of the 
sea-shore. It best combines the country and the sea- 
side. Though the Ocean is out of sight, its faintest mur- 
mur is audible, and you have only to climb a hill to find 
yourself on its brink. It is but a step from the glassy 
surface of the Herring Ponds to the big Atlantic Pond 
where the waves never cease to break. Or perhaps the 
Highland Light in Truro may compete with this locahty, 
for there there is a more uninterrupted view of the 
Ocean and the Bay, and in the summer there is always 
some air stirring on the edge of the bank there, so that 
the inhabitants know not what hot weather is. As for 
the view, the keeper of the light, with one or more of 
his family, walks out to the edge of the bank after eveiy 
meal to look off, just as if they had not lived there all 
their days. In short, it will wear well. And what pic- 
ture will you substitute for that, upon your walls ? But 
ladies cannot get down the bank there at present without 
the aid of a block and tackle. 

Most persons visit the sea-side in warm weather, 
when fogs are frequent, and the atmosphere is wont to 
be thick, and the charm of the sea is to some extent lost. 
But I suspect that th§ fall is the best season, for then the 
atmosphere is more transparent, and it is a greater 
pleasure to look out over the sea. The clear and bracing 



252 CAPE COD. ; .V " • . ■' -» 

air, and the storms of autumn and winter even, are ne- 
cessary in order that we may get the impression which 
the sea is. calculated to make. In October, when the 
weather is not intolerably cold, and the landscape wears 
its autumnal tints, such as, metliinks, only a Cape Cod 
landscape ever wears, especially if you have a storm 
during your stay, — that I am convinced is the best time 
to visit this shore. In autumn, even in August, the 
thoughtful days begin, and we can walk anywhere with 
profit. Beside, an outward cold and dreariness, which 
make it necessary to seek shelter at night, lend a spirit 
of adventure to a walk. 

The time must come when this coast will be a place 
of resort for those New-Englanders who really wish to 
visit the sea-side. At present it is wholly unknown to 
the fashionable world, and probably it will never be 
agreeable to them. If it is merely a ten-pin alley, or a 
circular railway, or an ocean of mint-julep, that the 
visitor is in search of, — if he thinks more of the wine 
than the brine, as I suspecj; some do at Newport, — I trust 
that for a long time he will be disappointed here. But 
this shore will never be more attractive than it is now. 
Such beaches as are fashionable are here made and un- 
made in a day, I may almost say, by the sea shifting its 
sands. Lynn and Nantasket ! this bare and bended arm 
it is that makes the bay in which they lie so snugly. 
What are springs and waterfalls ? Here is the spring 
of springs, the waterfall of waterfalls. A storm in the 
fall or winter is the tinae to visit it ; a light-house or a 
fisherman's hut. the true hotel. A man may stand there 
and put all America behind him. 

Cambridtl 



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